Dhe symbol for successful integration is handed over the counter in a paper plate. Inside are four handmade jiaozi in soy sauce. A friendly nod, please step aside, the next one. The three cooks behind the thick pane of glass hardly have time to look up, they make the dumplings as if on an assembly line. Italians are actually more conservative when it comes to food. However, there is always a line in front of the “Ravioleria Sarpi”, a Chinese take-away restaurant. The Jiaozi are delicious, called ravioli on the menu, the flour is organic, and the meat for the fillings comes from a biodynamic farm and is purchased from the butcher shop next door, the “Macelleria Sirtori” founded in 1931. It is one of the few remaining shops in Milan’s Chinatown that has only spoken Italian for decades.
The area around Via Paolo Sarpi is an exciting laboratory of coexistence, Chinese realities mix there with Italian – restaurants like the “Ravioleria” are one of the many results. You can taste the millennial imperial cuisine or drink bubble tea in an Italian pastry shop; you can see kimonos and the latest craze on Milan’s catwalks, take care of your tired feet in a Chinese health center or bring your broken iPhone to the Johnny Fix store, which nobody knows if it’s really called because everyone just says “L’aggiustatutto “-” the mechanic “- call: He repairs faster and cheaper than the Apple Store at the cathedral.
Apartment prices for 7,000 euros per square meter
Artists, journalists and intellectuals live in Chinatown. The district is currently becoming one of the hippest in the city, with apartment prices already reaching 7,000 euros per square meter. Many of the 27,000 Italians in Milan are displacing this into apartments in the periphery. The Chinese community, which is so multi-faceted that the term community doesn’t actually fit, comes to shop and work, but still in Via Paolo Sarpi: There are descendants of the first immigrants, who often no longer speak Chinese and hardly know the traditions ; there are families who immigrated from communist China in the 1980s and recent immigrants who grew up confident of belonging to an economic world power.
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Unlike Paris or London, Milan doesn’t make its Chinatown a figurehead. It is the oldest in Europe, and it was in Milan that in 1987 the Chinese officially celebrated the Chinese New Year for the first time in Europe. They proudly displayed the emblem of their culture: the dragon. The parade is now an annual event with up to 500,000 spectators. The city rejected the idea of setting up a pailou, a Chinese false gate. It could act like a social barrier, the Chinese mentality was already closed enough, was the tenor of the debate. Right-wing politicians use similar stereotypes. They use the ambiguity of the local culture to stir up fear of foreign infiltration.
Many Milanese have had enough of it. A group of committed artists and intellectuals has therefore now decided to create a different awareness for Chinatown. It includes the actor Shi Yang Shi, who made his difficult coming-out public in a Chinese context, and the economist Lala Hu, who denounced the increased distrust of the Italians at the beginning of the pandemic as racism. The author Ciaj Rocchi and the illustrator Matteo Demonte also see themselves as bridge builders. The 47-year-old is the third generation Italo-Chinese. When the couple had a son 15 years ago, they started collecting old photos and documents to tell him the story of his origins. What started out as a family album of sorts became a passion and the couple became experts in Chinese migration. With the aim of making their backgrounds known outside academic circles, it publishes comic essays, produces cartoons, organizes art events and exhibitions.
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