Introduction
Gianni Amelio's Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006 film, La stella che non c’è (The Missing Star, hereafter referred to as Stella) and Alessandro Perissinotto's Reference Perissinotto2014 novel, Coordinate d'Oriente (Oriental Coordinates, hereafter Coordinate), together with the literary text which inspired Amelio's film, Ermanno Rea's 2002 novel, La dismissione (The Decommissioning), can be categorised as narratives of labour or industrial literature of the kind that, as suggested by Marmo, writing about La dismissione, originated in the Italy of the boom and has continued beyond (Marmo Reference Marmo2001,156).Footnote 1 Each, indeed, has at its core the relationship of the male protagonist to the industry in which he is involved and, in both cases, this means ‘heavy’, traditionally male-dominated industries: steel production in Amelio and Rea, car production in Perissinotto. The narrator of Coordinate, who, like the author himself, teaches creative writing at a university, exhorts his students to transmit stories about ‘someone with an interesting working experience’ (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 15), and the novel interweaves the story of Italian automotive engineer, Pietro Fogliatti, putatively submitted as an assignment by the student Annarita Dionisio, with the account of the narrator's attempt to track him down in Shanghai. The case of the protagonist of Stella, the specialised technician Vincenzo Buonavolontà, is another such ‘interesting working experience’ and a key theme in the film is Vincenzo's attempt to come to terms with his recent redundancy, while Rea, referring to the relationship between his protagonist, Vincenzo Buonocore, and the Bagnoli steel plant, had described his novel as ‘the chronicle of a passion: between a man and a machine (machine, in the sense of plant, system of machines)’.Footnote 2 Perissinotto's narrator makes a direct reference to one of the most significant Italian industrial novels, La chiave a stella (1978; The Wrench), by another Turinese writer, Primo Levi (an echo of which is, of course, also present in the title of Amelio's film): ‘In the voice of Marino Calleris … there is an echo of that of Primo Levi's Tino Faussone, the voice of a man who, wrench in hand, has travelled around the world with pride at exporting skill’ (97); as will be seen, this definition applies equally well to Amelio's protagonist.
In this article I will focus on the way in which Amelio's and Perissinotto's works can be linked through their complex and thought-provoking creative explorations of contacts between Italian and Chinese industry, and I will consider their contribution to the representation of China and Chinese in contemporary Italian culture. Indeed, the two works are examples of Italian cultural representations of Sino-Italian relations, of the kind which are increasingly present across media and genres as Italy struggles to come to terms with the presence of Chinese immigrants and with changing global patterns of industrialisation/production and with shifts in the dynamics of industrial power. These include the novels, essays, films and television dramas produced in the last 20 years or so and listed in the references, by Lucarelli (Lucarelli, Reference Lucarelli1997), the Manetti brothers, Genna (Genna, Reference Genna2003), Saviano (Saviano, Reference Said2006), Pincio (Pincio, Reference Pincio2008 & Pincio, Reference Pincio and Pincio2012), Limerti, Nesi (Nesi, Reference Nesi2010), Pagliaro (Pagliaro, Reference Pagliaro2010), Pasqualotto (Pasqualotto, Reference Pasqualotto2011), Scurati (Scurati, Reference Scurati2011), Segre and Cotti (Cotti, Reference Cotti2018). Such representations, which include crime fiction for adults and adolescents, sci-fi, dystopian ‘climate fiction’, and film comedy and drama, contribute to the popular imaginary of China and, in some cases, while textual and paratextual evidence suggests the author's intention to critique that imaginary, the potency of the ideological framework within which they are inscribed produces results which, in effect, ultimately reiterate and reinforce certain narrative tropes. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon has resulted in the emergence of a rich vein of critical studies, including the works cited in the references by Bona (Bona, Reference Bona2014), Chu (Chu, Reference Chu2001 & Chu, Reference Chu2014), Chiara Giuliani (Giuliani, Reference Giuliani2019), Gaia Giuliani, Jurisic (Jurisic, Reference Jurisic2010), Carolan (Carolan, Reference Carolanforthcoming), Silvia Ross (Ross, Reference Ross2014), and Zhang (Zhang, Reference Zhang2017).
Although Chinese immigrants are, according to Istat figures, only the third most numerous group of non-EU citizens resident in Italy,Footnote 3 I contend that the impact of the Chinese presence is felt most strongly, and is, at least, manifested most frequently in cultural artefacts, because of the perceived threat of Chinese industry and Chinese-owned industries in Italy, particularly in sectors in which Italy was previously dominant, such as fashion and textiles, as argued cogently by Silvia Ross in her article on Edoardo Nesi's Storia della mia gente. Italian anxiety about the Chinese presence, either in Italy itself or on the global economic stage, can be perceived or is analysed in studies and journalistic essays such as Rampini's Il secolo cinese (Reference Rampini2005), Sisci's Chi ha paura della Cina (Reference Sisci and Cordero di Montezemolo2006), and Casti and Portanova's Chi ha paura dei cinesi?, Oriani and Staglianò’s I cinesi non muoiono mai (Oriani, Staglianò, Reference Oriani and Staglianò2008) and Pieraccini's L'assedio cinese (Pieraccini, Reference Pieraccini2010). It is my perception that, while popular and media discourse about the largest groups, Albanian and Moroccan citizens respectively, and their countries of origin is dominated by stories of criminality, a theme which also features in news reports on Chinese immigrants and in the novels and films referred to above, articles on Chinese industrial production, either in China or linked to the immigrant community, are also prominent.Footnote 4 Among the themes which recur in Italian discourse on Chinese industry are: the changing dynamic of industrial power between Italy and China; ‘Made in Italy’ vs ‘Made in China’; tradition vs modernity; and environmental (and social) responsibility.
My argument, therefore, is located within the context of Gaia Giuliani's thesis, which is based on a reading of Cinacittà, L'arrivo di Wang, Io sono Li, and the episode of the Rai television series, Radici: L'altra faccia dell'emigrazione featuring the Chinese Italian Malia Zheng (2013). The argument is that ‘Chinese difference’ is articulated in the white collective imaginary along three specific axes: first, the sense of a ‘silent invasion’, the origins of which Giuliani traces in the earlier American and English perception of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and which resonates with the title of Campani, Carchedi and Tassinari's collection of sociological essays on the Chinese communities in Italy, L'immigrazione silenziosa (Reference Campani, Carchedi and Tassinari1994); second, the idea of a ‘progressive and inexorable appropriation’ of Italian space and resources; and third, the conviction that behind China's apparently peaceful and non-violent ‘conquest’ of Italy lie crime organisations and an illiberal regime which share scant regard for human life, the community and the environment (Giuliani Reference Giuliani, Deplano, Mari and Proglio2014, 235–236).
In both Amelio's film and Perissinotto's novel, these motifs and the overarching theme of contact between the economies of the two countries are sublimated in narratives involving relationships between Western men and Chinese women, and it is this theme which is the focus of the present article. In Stella, the story of Vincenzo's travels through China's industrial landscape runs parallel to that of the development of the relationship between Vincenzo and the Chinese interpreter, Liu Hua; in Coordinate, the story of Fogliatti and his attempts to establish an ecologically and socially responsible plant in China is linked to his relationship with a Chinese woman, Jin Jiaqing, with whom he shares a sense of grief and anger over the loss of a child in a road accident.Footnote 5 In the case of Stella, the decision to introduce into the plot the Italian/Chinese aspect of the male/female relationship is highlighted by the absence of the figure of the Chinese woman in Rea's novel, in which the interpreter is briefly sketched, instead, as ‘a very young girl, but remarkably intelligent and vivacious, who arrives in Bagnoli from northern Italy’ (Rea Reference Rea2002a, 39). There is a significant and symbolic female presence in the novel, however, but this is an Italian woman. Rea's Buonocore suggests an identification between the death of Marcella, his young woman friend, and the closure of the plant:
Santa Maria Desolata was as packed as a tin of sardines; there was jostling outside the church, too, almost as far as the level crossing: hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand or even more. Why so many people at that funeral? It's difficult to give an answer. Perhaps because Marcella – she who was so young and apparently so far removed from the factory and its myth – found herself representing with her death, in a clamorously involuntary way, everything which had filled our lives in the neighbourhood and which was suddenly disappearing.
That funeral was like a millstone around the neck of 1999: it was our way of mourning the defunct factory, the old century, or rather the millennium, which were on their way out in their turn. An ideal event to bury something symbolic: a past of hopes, conjectures, ideologies; to bury affections, memories, ways of life. (352)
Indeed, the priest, in his homily, takes up the subject of Marcella's death to urge the community to look towards and to become protagonists of a new, post-industrial future (352). In Rea's novel, therefore, the young woman's death as a result of an unspecified illness linked, it is implied, to her self-destructive lifestyle, is signalled by the narrator's supposed source as being symbolic of the decommissioning of the plant and, by extension, of the decline of Italian industry. The transformation of the deuteragonist from a local to a Chinese woman who will not share the destiny of Marcella within the film, but who, in another way, as will be demonstrated below, represents the industrial status of her country, is, I argue, more than a circumstance dictated by the change in setting from La dismissione to Stella and justifies a brief discussion of the film's genesis and of its relationship to the novel.
From Bagnoli to Baotou: paternity and redundancy in Amelio's La stella che non c’è
While acknowledging the literary inspiration of the film, the director says that, starting from the novel, the film traces a new story. Indeed, Amelio's film begins where La dismissione, about the decommissioning of the Ilva steel plant in Bagnoli (Naples), ends.Footnote 6 Whereas the close of Rea's novel sees the protagonist, Vincenzo Buonocore, watching the dismantled plant being shipped off to China, Amelio's Vincenzo Buonavolontà pursues the blast furnace to and around China, driven by the desire to substitute a faulty part, which had been responsible for a worker's death in Italy, with a replacement which he has hand-crafted.Footnote 7 The theme of Italian industrial decline and the rise of Asian industry is, not surprisingly, already evident in La dismissione, as alluded to by Lorenzo Codelli in his introductory essay to the published screenplay of Amelio's film:
… The rumours about the big sell-off came and went on the crest of the wind: the continuous casting machines are being dismantled for the Chinese; the no. 5 blast furnace is being dismantled for the Indians; the lime ovens are being dismantled for Malaysia; the rolling train is being dismantled for Thailand… So the funereal, frustrated steelworker Vincenzo Bonocore [sic] prefigures the ‘Asianised’ dismemberment of his own beloved Ilva steelworks in the pages of Ermanno Rea's novel The Decommissioning. Vincenzo Buonavolontà, his offshoot in the pages of the screenplay written for The Missing Star, inherits some of his personality tics, together with his rancorous stubbornness and his nostalgia for a glorious industrial past. (Codelli Reference Codelli2006a, 5; author's emphasis)
Furthermore, it is clear that the carving up of the Ilva plant is linked to the perception by Rea's character of his own metaphorical dismemberment and how, in Amelio's protagonist, this sense of personal diminution is paralleled to a sense of Italy's loss of industrial primacy. In spite of the author's protest that La dismissione is nothing more than the story of Vincenzo's passion, his insistence on what the book is not – ‘neither an indictment nor an inquiry nor, even less, the historical and political reconstruction of the troubled life of the factory up to its annihilation’ (Rea Reference Rea2002b, 7) – paradoxically draws the reader's attention to just such a ‘documentary’ and polemical function of the text. Interestingly, Amelio asserts something similar for his film, playing down the element of political commitment, and with an analogous effect:
As the story proceeds one almost forgets the reason why the Italian workman has set off for China, the fact that behind his journey there is the hard problem of the closure of a factory, the job losses. Once again, notwithstanding my commitment, I have managed not to make a ‘committed’ film. (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 13)
To return to the representation in Amelio's film of the relationship between the Italian man and the Chinese woman, it would be fair to say that this is complex: at times the film partially inverts the conventional Orientalist hierarchy which subordinates the (female) Oriental to the (male) Westerner but, at others, it reverts to this more typical dynamic. It is true that, when Vincenzo miraculously tracks her down in a Shanghai university library, Liu Hua, after initially rebuffing him because of his boorish behaviour towards her on their first meeting in Italy, takes the initiative and offers to become his guide on his search for the defective blast furnace, which, in the meantime, has been sold on to a company somewhere else in China by the holding company that had acquired it in Italy. Vincenzo is, initially, totally dependent on her and is repeatedly depicted trailing behind her, struggling to keep up and falling sick on their journey. He is at first unable to communicate with most of the people he encounters, so that Liu Hua is forced, for example, to rescue him at the railway station and to extricate him from arrest after he has wandered unauthorised into a steel plant. His attempts at speaking Chinese become the object of Liu Hua's laughter: on the train, he buys himself a ‘hundred-year egg’ (皮蛋 pídàn) but, she says, in his pronunciation, this becomes ‘cretin’ (笨蛋 bèndàn). However, whereas Rea's northern Italian interpreter is, as we have seen, competent, confident and efficient, Liu Hua, the interpreter in Stella, is out of her depth in Italy, an inexperienced undergraduate student – forced to study Italian, ‘a minor language’, because her high school grades were insufficient to earn her a university place studying a major language .Footnote 8 Her inability to deal with technical terms had been brusquely exposed by Buonavolontà in one of the early scenes in Italy, causing her to lose her job: this ‘deprofessionalisation’ of the interpeter character in her cinematic iteration has the effect of disempowering the Chinese woman and affirming her subalternity. Vincenzo, instead, is associated throughout the film as the possessor of mechanical expertise. In one of the early scenes set in Italy, there is a long sequence without dialogue in which the camera focuses on him crafting the replacement part; in the apartment of Liu Hua's friends in Chongqing, he repairs a pedal sewing machine (while the women produce ersatz ‘traditonal’ costumes on electric machines, again, establishing a distinction between the technical know-how of the European male and the comparatively low-skilled labour of the Chinese women); and in her village, in a scene which is so brief that it could easily be overlooked, as he comes across an old piece of machinery, he pauses for an instant and touches, almost caresses it, thus reaffirming the idea of a passion between man and machine.Footnote 9
The somewhat ambivalent portrayal of the relationship between the two main characters can be exemplified by two scenes which undergo a change between the screenplay and the released film. In the first, on the ferry travelling along the Yangtze River, there is a reversal of roles between Liu Hua and Vincenzo. In the screenplay, it is she who boasts, with nationalistic pride, of the engineering feat of the Three Gorges Dam, citing statistic after statistic about the dimensions of the dam, its capacity for generating hydro-electric power and the number of settlements which will be submerged, their inhabitants displaced and relocated. The directions tell us that Liu Hua is indifferent to the effects of the construction on human lives and the natural environment:
LIU HUA: It will be biggest dam in the world…. It will make a lake of 600 kilometres.
VINCENZO: You mean to say that everything we have seen today will end up under water?
Liu Hua nods. She doesn't seem too bothered by that prospect which, on the contrary, disturbs Vincenzo. She thinks of the progress, of the wellbeing that will be derived from it.
LIU HUA: Dam will produce 18,200 megawatts of electricity for city Shanghai and other 8 provinces … […] 1,200,000 people must leave old house … 13 big cities, 140 small cities, 1,352 villages … They will be … How do you say … Drowned …
VINCENZO (quietly): Drowned … (Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 78–79)
In the completed film, through reassignment of the lines extolling the virtues of the dam, Vincenzo's status as didactic male, holder of technical knowledge and proponent of progress is reaffirmed, while the female character, Liu Hua, is recast in a ‘caring’ role (though it might be argued that she is thus portrayed as possessing an ecological knowledge which has its own value, albeit different from that of Vincenzo's conventionally ‘scientific’ view), as the one who points out the disruption to the lives of the inhabitants of the flooded valley above the dam:
LIU HUA: Soon it will become 600 kilometre lake. Here there is biggest dam in the world.
…
VINCENZO: You know that it produces 18,000 megawatts of electricity for Shanghai and another 7, 8 provinces?
LIU HUA: Sugar cane is never sweet at both ends.
VINCENZO: What does that mean?
LIU HUA: The people have left their homes, everything you see will be drowned …
VINCENZO: Progress …
(‘Dialoghi’, in Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 136–137)
The effect of Liu Hua's introducing her reflection through a proverb – a trait repeated in the closing scene when they are reunited at a remote railway station and Vincenzo asks her how she has managed to reach him: ‘Straight road always shortest. Tracks are straight road’ (‘Dialoghi’ in Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 148) – is to make her appear as the representative of an ancient wisdom, highlighting, in this instance, Vincenzo's western modernity.Footnote 10
Incidentally, the scenes filmed by cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, which are set against the backdrop of the demolition of a city to be flooded as a result of the construction of the dam, share the same aesthetic as that which can be found in Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's Reference Burtynsky, Mayer, Fishman and Kingwell2005 book, China, produced at around the same time as Amelio's film, and on the related website where we find the artist's statement: ‘mass consumerism … and the resulting degradation of our environment intrinsic to the process of making things to keep us happy and fulfilled frightens me. I no longer see my world as delineated by countries, with borders, or language, but as 7 billion humans living off a single, finite planet’. Indeed, some of the locations of Stella, most notably that of the Three Gorges Dam, can also be found in Jennifer Baichwal's 2006 film, Manufactured Landscapes, in which the filmmaker follows Burtynsky to China ‘as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution’ (Manufactured Landscapes film website). Burtynsky's photographs in Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky, Pauli, Reference Burtynsky, Pauli, Haworth-Booth and Baker2003) do not focus solely on China, and include, for example, shots of the environmental impact of industrialisation in north America and Italy, as well as in other Asian locations, such as Bangladesh, and there is an acknowledgement on the website of the ethical questions raised by his aestheticisation of environmental devastation, ‘without trying to easily answer them’ (ibid.). I suggest that there is, however, also a question, when China is the object of the Western gaze, as in Burtynsky's China and in Stella, of an implied ethical judgement on the part of the observing subject, in an uneven power dynamic.
The second aspect of the relationship between Vincenzo and Liu Hua in which we witness a change between the intentions of Amelio and Contarello as screenwriters and the result produced by Amelio as director concerns the sexual attraction between the characters. The screenplay clearly indicates a romantic attachment between the two, as can be seen in the scene in the courtyard of the apartment block in Chongqing:
LIU HUA: You got lot of water, have wind in blood. Let's go home.
Liu Hua stands up and leads Vincenzo by the hand. As soon as they enter the front door their contact turns into an embrace, almost without their realising it.
VINCENZO: Say something nice to me. I want to hear something nice from you.
Liu Hua brushes his forehead with a finger, running it down, following the curve of his nose as far as his mouth and his chin.
LIU HUA: I like your face … It is ancient face, like coin from ancient Rome …
Vincenzo kisses the palm of her hand.
At that moment, a young man who had been observing them for a while approaches from the courtyard. With an allusive tone he hisses something at Liu Hua, something serious, that hurts her. (Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 89)
In the film, the sexual element is played down. It is only after their conversation is interrupted by the young Chinese man – cast, I would argue, in the role of the ‘perfidious Chinaman’, the archetype of which is Sax Rohmer's Fu ManchuFootnote 11 – who accuses Liu Hua of prostituting herself with a foreigner and demands a share of her earnings, and after her angry and indignant reaction to the accusation, that the offended young woman turns to Vincenzo in an embrace that perhaps conveys more a need for, and an attempt to provide, protection and consolation. In the final sequence of the film, however, Liu Hua tells Vincenzo that her son cried when the toy which had earlier been foisted on the Italian by street pedlars broke, but that she reassured him by telling him that Vincenzo would know how to fix it. Vincenzo examines the broken toy and reflects: ‘Once upon a time even toys got fixed; now they get thrown away, like shoes’; sighing, he adds ‘We will buy him a new one’, the use of the first person plural implying a future relationship with Liu Hua. This shift from a paternal relationship with Liu Hua,Footnote 12 to assumed paternity of her son, is identified by Amelio himself in his conversation with Codelli:
In the end everything suggests that Vincenzo will stay with the girl, he will be a father for that boy …. The feeling that Vincenzo has for Liu Hua is impalpable but it reveals itself gradually. There is a revealing moment, when on the ferry she moves away and plays like a little girl, clinging on to the railing. He is watching her and seems to want to say something to her, but he stops himself. From then on there are so many little reactions that suggest a paternal affection, then the beginning of love, when the sense of paternity is in some way satisfied by the discovery of the secret son. (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 29–30)
Significantly, in his account of the love interest in the film, Amelio's language and the choice of Vincenzo's perspective denies Liu Hua agency, ultimately casting the ‘oriental’ woman as both childlike and the object of the Western male's desire, be it for paternity or sexual love, or both.Footnote 13 The trope according to which the Oriental is childlike, in contrast to the Westerner's maturity (Said Reference Said1978, 40), surfaces in the directions in the screenplay, in which we read, ‘Vincenzo takes a deep breath in order to calm down, but he doesn't succeed; he doesn't know how to respond to her childish moods’ (Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 99). The opposition of mature versus childlike is obviously exacerbated by the casting of the two lead roles: Sergio Castellitto (born 1953) was at the time in his early fifties, while Tai Ling – as the actress Ling Tai's name appears in the film's credits and in all references in the published screenplay – was in her early twenties, and this, combined with the circumstance of an affirmed actor playing opposite a novice establishes a clear hierarchy between the two.
It is worth noting that Amelio, while emphasising the centrality of Liu Hua – who, the director claims, is ‘a young woman protagonist in every sense’ (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 18) – and insisting that she is not simply an excuse to speak of ‘his own male organ’,Footnote 14 does not entirely escape the trap of objectification of the oriental woman. In response to the interviewer's question as to how he found Tai Ling, a choice of words which, in itself, might be construed as indicative of an unequal power relationship beyond that inherent in the director-actor dynamic,Footnote 15 Amelio replies:
It was pointless to go to the best casting agencies in China, asking: give me a beautiful Chinese girl who knows how to act, perhaps even a minor star who will open the oriental markets to me, and who knows Italian, too. (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 19; my emphasis)
He goes on, in his discussion about the casting of the actor to play Liu Hua through a call among students of Italian at a Beijing university, to demean and ‘other’ Chinese Italians with a reference to his perception of the “comical effect’ of their regional accents when speaking ‘our language’ (my emphasis).Footnote 16
The director assigns the character of Liu Hua a symbolic role and links her to a discussion of contemporary China and, it is implied, the country's industrial development, describing her as ‘a human being who is both strong and fragile at the same time and who perhaps incarnates the contradictions of her country’ (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 17). If Vincenzo, too, personifies an idealised set of Italian values – integrity, loyalty to undefined ‘ancient values’ – Amelio seems only in part to invert the binaries of ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ conventionally assigned to Orient and Occident, and to establish an analogy between Italy's and China's long histories. When Codelli refers to the parallelism in the film between the end of Western industrial civilisation and the same phenomenon in the Orient, Amelio appeals to a supposed ‘ancient wisdom’ and its potential as a correcting force with regard to the structural difficulties created by China's rush towards modernity:
I got the idea of the fault which renders the plant sold to the Chinese already broken at the outset …. So here is the figure of the maintenance worker whose slightly mad integrity should force us to reflect on the future. Perhaps I wanted to describe a need for fidelity to some set of ancient values, however. Both in a world like ours which is ancient in its own right, and in a world like China, which should possess pillars of wisdom beyond what is said today about its modernity, about its power in the world economy, etc. … This ‘great leap forward’ about which so much is spoken could have feet of clay; and it can become a strength only if China doesn't forget other needs, beyond those of unbridled development. China today is paying an astronomical price, a worrying price, in this rigged race. Everything you see at the level of human cost is frightening. Instead, what inspires trust is the relationship with people, and you think that that great country, with all its history behind it, cannot fail to recompose the correct weight of existence. (Codelli Reference Codelli2006b, 29)
Despite the reference to Italy being ‘ancient in its own right’, Amelio's emphasis falls heavily on its appeal to the ‘perennial but still-useful truth from classical sinology: the thing about China is that it is very big and very old’ (Vukovich Reference Vukovich2012, 149), thereby reproducing an element of Orientalist knowledge about China. Notwithstanding the attempt to attribute positive traits to the character of Liu Hua, therefore, Amelio appears, to paraphrase Said, to be acknowledging the ‘greatness’ of Chinese civilisation, thus disguising or mitigating the assumed relationship of strong to weak, while ultimately operating within what the author of Orientalism describes as the Western ‘assumption … that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West’ (Said Reference Said1978, 41–42). Wilson suggests in her comments on Amelio's film that ‘[t]he act of photographing an entire country that is presupposed as “Other” is an act that is ever-so-finely balanced between magnanimous intent on the one hand and vague imperialism on the other’ (Wilson Reference Wilson, Wilson and Ramey Correi2011,17): notwithstanding a degree of sensitivity to difference in Stella and a genuine attempt to tell Liu Hua's story, the subtle relegation of her character to a subaltern role reaffirms an Orientalist dynamic between the Western male and the Chinese woman and, given their representative status within this industrial narrative, re-establishes an ideal, though questionable, hierarchy between Italy and China.
Ultimately, it is through his own agency alone that Vincenzo locates in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the plant which has bought the Italian blast furnace, and he ostensibly succeeds in explaining to a Chinese worker the need to substitute the faulty part, although ironically the part will subsequently be discarded by the worker's colleagues, who are unable to distinguish between Vincenzo's artisanally-crafted component and the mass-produced parts they already have. In the scenes leading up to this, however, the protagonist is seen communicating successfully his needs to the Chinese characters he encounters, in a barber's shop, a bar and when hitching a lift. On his arrival in Shanghai and in his encounter with Xu Xi, manager of the holding company that has bought and sold the blast furnace, Vincenzo protests that, unlike the Italian plant and unlike Mr Chong, the leader of the Chinese delegation that had travelled to Italy, he has not been ‘decommissioned’. But in practice, by paying the van driver to take the sleeping Liu Hua back in the direction from which they have come, Vincenzo renders her redundant.
The ambivalent gaze: paternalism and subalternity in Perissinotto's Coordinate d'Oriente
If in Amelio's film the stars on the Chinese flag are said to represent ‘honesty, patience, justice and solidarity’, one of which, however, ‘is always missing’ (Amelio and Contarello Reference Amelio, Contarello and Codelli2006, 143), in Coordinate the two words which represent the ideals of Pietro Fogliatti are ‘responsibility’ and ‘safety’. When the narrator asks Marino Calleris about the nature of the project behind the factory Fogliatti has set up in China, the production engineer replies:
The idea of a laboratory, a social laboratory …. Here, the weight of the Party in how things are organised is still felt. We can't turn up talking about Community …. And so we set out from the two words which Pietro used as his banner: responsibility and safety. That would be sufficient to bring about a revolution in China. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 91–92)
Fogliatti is an Italian engineer missing in Shanghai, where he had been producing the ‘Great Wall’: his electric car design is a clean solution, affordable to the masses, to China's growing carbon-emissions problem, but, by basing production in China, he also aims to set up a socially-responsible factory, thereby, as Calleris implies, bringing about a revolution, which is not that referred to by the Chinese Communist Party as the Liberation. Calleris indicates that China is not the same as Ivrea, describing as a simplification the narrator's reference to Adriano Olivetti's attempts to create a City of Man.Footnote 17 Fogliatti embodies values of responsible industrial and technological development, but there is nevertheless something paternalistic about his project or, at least, about the way his fellow European speaks about it:
Pietro was pushing to have us reduce sub-suppliers to the minimum and to ask our suppliers to use our same standards. And then, his dream was to go beyond standards. He wanted a health clinic open to the workers’ families, a school for the employees’ children, European-style working hours. He was insisting on that principle of exporting rights. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 93; my emphasis)
Calleris, on the other hand, could be said to represent a certain type of ex-patriot Italian (or European) with his condescending attitude towards his Chinese subordinate and his unshakeable belief in the inherent superiority of Made in Italy over Made in China:
Calleris and the Chinese are becoming heated and, even without wanting to, I listen. They are talking about a micron and how to measure it. A micron of tolerance relative to the specifications laid down in the design, no more. The Chinese protests, he says that a micron is nothing. Calleris digs his heels in. I hear him say that a micron is the difference between a Chinese product and an Italian product, between a Lamborghini and a Great Wall. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 93.)
And yet, the narratorial voice, the professor of creative writing, sees not condescension, but an heroic fidelity to ideals, akin to that of Fogliatti himself:
And finally I understand that Calleris’ insistence is not a question of pique, it is passion, an ideal. With a humanist's distorted mind, I thought for years that ideals could be identified only with great social projects, with utopias, revolts, revolutions; that ideals were in a project or, at most, in art … . Marino Calleris, on the other hand, is demonstrating to me that a mechanical part … can embody more ideals than a politician will pursue in a lifetime. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 93)
There is an ambivalence, therefore, in the presentation of the European's superior, or even, it might be argued, ‘colonial’ attitude to his Chinese subordinate, which is implicitly criticised but, at the same time, celebrated for the values it reveals.
In the narration of his experience in China – for the student Annarita Dionisio is, as explained previously, the pseudonym behind which he hides – Fogliatti describes how, having ordered some glasses in a shopping centre, he happens upon where they are being prepared and witnesses child labour and the disregard for basic safety norms that are observed in passing in Amelio's film, too:
‘They'll be ready in half an hour’, the boy had reassured him. So, to pass the time, Pietro had begun wandering around the shopping centre, losing himself as though in a labyrinth and, either as a game or by mistake, turning down corridors reserved for authorised personnel only. And, in one of these, at a certain point, he had seen his new glasses. The frame was resting on a little iron table, of the kind used in workshops, waiting for a child, who was sitting beside it with a camping stove lit in front of him, to finish the operation of treating the lenses to darken them. With a pair of pliers, he was immersing the glass into an old pan filled with a smoking, black, runny paste, which, over the flame of the stove, was giving off foul-smelling vapours. The infinite precision with which his high-quality lenses had been ground clashed with the crudely approximative nature of this stage in the process; Pietro thought of the futuristic Zeiss factory, with its robots and its technicians in their mobcaps and masks, and then he compared the image to the one he had before him, with the child poisoning his lungs and his soul for a few renminbi a day. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014,112)
While the Italian engineer's reflections on child labour and unsafe working practices seem to confirm aspects of Gaia Giuliani's assertion, referred to above, regarding the ‘third axis’ of the articulation of China's ‘difference’ (exploitation of the workforce, low value attached to human life and the well-being of individuals and the community), the narrator points out instead that such practices are not exclusive to China's new economy but, on the contrary, have historic precedents in Italy's industrial past and are a widespread feature of today's global economy:
We all live with a time bomb inside our bodies, with a constant warning that should prompt us not to repeat the same mistakes. But knowing serves no purpose. That benzidine and beta naphthylamine were carcinogens was already known, officially, as early as 1921: ipca, the Piedmontese Aniline Paint Factory, opens its gates in 1922. If knowing served a purpose, we would have wiped from the face of the earth all the time bomb factories, but instead we have simply delocalised them: to India, to Bangladesh, to China. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014,124)
It is possible to notice again the affinity of concerns between the photographer Burtynsky and, in this case, Perissinotto. Burtynsky's work in the area can be seen in his photobook on China and in The Anthropocene Project, his recent collaboration with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, which produced a book, documentary and exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Burtynsky, Baichwal, de Pencier, Reference Burtynsky, Baichwal and de Pencier2018). The representation of Western ecological concerns regarding Chinese industrial development needs to be contextualised, however, by an examination of Chinese moves towards an ‘ecological civilisation’, as analysed by Maurizio Marinelli in his article on the related political discourse and intellectual debate in China (Marinelli, Reference Marinelli2018).
In spite of this sensitivity on Perissinotto's part to the dangers of condemning Chinese industrial practices without reflection on the global, European and specifically Italian record in this area, what is somewhat perplexing in the novel is the nature of the relationship which develops between Fogliatti and the Chinese woman, Jin Jiaqing. Although we learn of Jin's story, her voice is always mediated through Pietro's masculine narration, notwithstanding his assumption of the female persona of the student Annarita Dionisio. As already mentioned, Fogliatti and Jin are united by the shared experience of the loss of a child in a road accident – Fogliatti's step-daughter Giorgia and Jin's son Zheng, by their dedication to the memory of the deceased, kept alive through roadside shrines, and by the denunciation of the men they consider responsible for the deaths. These men are Claudio, the father of Giorgia's boyfriend, whom Fogliatti blames for instilling a passion for speed in his son Andrea, who also died in the accident and whom Fogliatti mistakenly believes was riding the motorbike at the time of the accident; and Xi Liu, son of the owner of one of Shanghai's most important construction companies, who, drunk, has run down Zheng. Annarita-Pietro's account describes this as a shared passion which unites Pietro and Jin against the world:
It was pain that had brought them to know each other and with that pain, at least in the early days, they had nourished each other continuously, like two people who discover that they have a shared passion, a rare passion, and who feel united by it, against the whole world. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014,129)
Despite this apparent parity, we also learn that the relationship is initially based on Pietro's observation of the woman, in which the subject and the object of the gaze are clearly delineated:
Then, one day, as is obvious, or else I wouldn't be here pursuing the story, he saw the woman, too.
…
So, hoping not to make things worse, when she set off walking towards the city centre, he, as discreetly as possible, followed her.
…
The woman was cleaning, conscientiously. She passed the feather duster over the guitar bodies and inside the bell of a monumental tuba. Pietro spied on her. (Perissinotto Reference Perissinotto2014, 76–77; my emphasis)
One can't give oneself courage, don Abbondio would say; Pietro instead gave himself courage, calmly, following the woman for days, like a stalker, protected by the darkened windows of his car. (102; my emphasis)
The scene in which Pietro first sights Jin and follows her reaches its culmination in these lines, in which the hegemony of the male gaze is incontestable:
He was watching her play. She kept her eyes closed …. And, finally, he was able to see her well. (78)
Even when, at the end of the scene, the roles are reversed, the grammatical structure – ‘Lo sguardo di lei si alzò’ – diminishes Jin's subject status and, in this example and throughout the novel, there is an emphasis on Jin's beauty:
She appeared a little under forty, but her long hair, loose on her shoulders, gave her back a residue of adolescence, a light air which contrasted with the wrinkles under her eyes ….
The music ended suddenly, without Pietro having the time to get back into cover. Her gaze rose and he, without reason, felt exposed. (78; my emphasis)
The theme of the gaze first surfaces in the opening pages of the novel, in which the narrator describes his first impressions of Shanghai. Here, too, despite the disconcerting female scrutiny of the male narrator, emphasis is placed on female physicality and alterity – ‘thin lips …, stupendous almond-shaped eyes’ (10) – and any subjectivity that the women might have through their speech is undermined by the fact that the narrator describes their words as ‘indecipherable’ (10.):
Everywhere, cyclopic screens, fifteen or twenty metres high, pour onto the passers-by advertising films in a continuous loop. Close framed, young women's thin lips pronounce words which to me are indecipherable, stupendous, gigantic, almond-shaped eyes scrutinise me: I feel like an insect under a magnifying glass. (10.)
In any case, it is worth noting that the gaze and voice of the women are only ‘virtual’, disembodied from physical bodies.
Conclusion
As stated at the outset, both Stella and Coordinate are multi-faceted and stimulating works, and both, to some extent, undermine conventional Orientalist discourse in their interpretations of the relationship between Italy and China, as represented by the male–female pairings of Vincenzo/Liu and Pietro/Jin. A close reading of both works has also given me an appreciation of their aesthetic, narrative and thematic complexity. My analysis of the two texts in the current examination of relations between Italy and Asia is, however, guided by a desire to understand the ways in which representations in the film and the book function within the ideological context in which they were produced, and this has led to the conclusion that ultimately and perhaps inevitably, Amelio's and Perissinotto's texts remain, at some level, inscribed in an uneven dynamic of power between Italy and China.
Despite the fragility of both Vincenzo and Pietro and their dependence – particularly linguistic – on Liu and Jin, which is revealed sensitively in the respective works, both male characters retain in the narratives a degree of power, in the form of wealth, which renders the female characters subordinate. This personal economic hierarchy is entirely plausible at the level of the narrative about individuals, and mirrors IMF statistics which show Italy's much higher GDP per capita between 2000 and 2014 (the year in which Perissinotto's book was published), albeit with a diminishing differential between the two countries. At the same time, however, it needs to be considered in the context of the other economic trend of the relative change in the economic fortunes of the two countries, with Italy's real GDP growth in the period 2001–2014 ranging between -5.5% and 1.8%, compared to China's 7.3–14.2% growth.Footnote 18 This trend and Italian anxiety regarding it underpin both Stella and Coordinate. If Amelio's film and Perissinotto's novel are both set against the background of a shift in industrial production from Italy to China, the personal narrative in each foregrounds instead the dominance of the Italian man over the Chinese woman.
In her study of ‘Sexualised Exoticism and Gendered Racism in Contemporary Italy’, Gaia Giuliani identifies in the context of the Italian media
a discourse that tends to construct acceptable Otherness as an orientalized, harmless, silenced, and distanced object of televisual touristic pleasure, and reduce black female social actors to objects of desire/abjection. (Reference Giuliani2016, 550)
Following on from this, she states:
To be included within the imagined (racialized) community of the Nation, these subjects need to be transformed in appropriable objects. The good savage, the little brown victim, as well as the Mammy are thus deployed to contain the ‘unmasterable’ Jezebel and Sapphire, to reduce them to subalternity and eventually preserve white hegemony. (550)
While the language used by Giuliani might be considered too harsh with regard to the nuanced and complex representations of Chinese women examined here, I argue that the relationship between Italy's and China's economies is linked in these narratives to those between Vincenzo and Liu, and between Pietro and Jin, so that the two works still contribute, in some way, to an ideal reestablishment of Italian hegemony: Liu Hua and Jin Jiaqing, functioning in the film and novel as representatives of China and each being cast in a role which is ultimately subaltern in relation to the male protagonists, Vincenzo Buonavolontà and Pietro Fogliatti, serve to render China ‘masterable’ in these Italian representations of the relationship between the two countries. It might be suggested, therefore, that the symbolic pattern in the two works of the Italian man dominating the Chinese woman could be read as a subconscious compensation for the geopolitical and economic imbalance between the two countries: in other words, that, in terms of extent, population and industrial production, Italy stands to China, the second largest global economy, in a more or less David versus Goliath position (as do most countries), so, one might speculate, the (partly) controlling Italian male character could figure to some extent as a psychological corrective to that disparity.
Note on contributor
Mark Chu is Senior Lecturer in Italian at University College Cork and served as Head of Department from 2004 to 2018. He has published widely on Sicilian literature and was editor in chief of the first three issues (2011–2013) of Todomodo, the international Journal of Sciascia Studies published by Leo S. Olschki in collaboration with the Associazione degli Amici di Leonardo Sciascia. His research interests also include Italian and European crime fiction, and he has published both on Italian crime fiction and on English authors of crime fiction whose work is set in Italy. Running through his work is a concern with questions of identity. His current research project is leading to a book on Italian representations of China and Chinese people.
