Francesca and Cristina in Beijing
“卖白菜，大白菜， 有需要的吗?”
“Francesca, do we need cabbages? The truck selling cabbages is passing by!”
“No, Cristina, we still have them, we bought them last day!”
“Where are you from?” This is one of the questions that scares me the most!
I’m Cristina from Cittadella, a walled town just north of Padua, but calling it home is a bit strange to me.
Since I was little, thanks to my family, this town has only been a base for long trips around the world, with the dream of making it a place with more solidarity. On my 10th birthday I was in a small town in the North-East of Brazil, during the high school I was in Santiago de Chile, divided between the subway, the Andean peaks and social demonstrations for human rights, which then led me to graduate, again in Santiago, in Trabajo Social.
After the far west, the east could not be missed, and so, on a freezing morning in January 2009, I landed in Peking. No preparation, no knowledge of the language, just a great desire to get involved and let myself be enriched by the encounter with different cultures and people.
It had worked until then, why shouldn’t it work now?
Hi, I am Francesca.
A winter afternoon, I was more or less 10 years old, on a crowed bus, my sister invited me to move aside to let other people get on, and I, annoyed by the crowd, blurted out: “Each body occupies its own space!”.
My passion for science must have been born around that time, that passion then led me to graduate in chemistry a few years later. Chemistry would then take me to Peking University for a post-doc, and then to teach, in a mix of English and Chinese, in a high school.
In reality, chemistry was a “cover”, the choice of China was the answer to a dream, to a desire to live a life spent for others trying to build a small piece of good.
I am Francesca and I am from Como, where I was born in what at that time, unbeknownst to me, was the year of the roster (or, for me, better still, the hen!).
We found ourselves sharing our lives in China, partly by chance, partly because we shared the desire to give back something of everything we had received in our lives, by standing alongside to those who couldn’t make it alone.
In June 2011, when Cristina had already been in China for more than two years, Francesca joined her in the seventh-floor apartment in the eastern suburbs of Beijing.
At that time, there were also Wen Mei, Tian Tian, Ling Ling and Yani in the house, all girls of different ages, but united by their almond-shaped eyes and that impossible language that has slowly become familiar to us. In these thirteen years we have lived many different experiences, some adventurous, some funny, some difficult, but we can say that they have all enriched us.
We would like to share with you our life here, a life made of daily routine, but which perhaps can help to better understand the true face of this country, beyond many myths, trying to dispel commonplaces, which often only create prejudices.
