Europe Under the Bridge
By Simona Relea
e-mail simona.relea@ziaruldeiasi

“Europa” is a large marketplace which opened on the outskirts of Bucharest at the end of the 90s. Within its narrow alleyways, hundreds of Chinese operate small stalls, selling Chinese-manufactured shoes, clothes, cosmetics. The merchandise is cheaper than anything made in Romania and this is the reason their businesses have flourished. Because the Chinese speak almost no Romanian, they hire local Romanian sales help. No contracts are signed, and most of the businesses in “Europa” show little respect for Romanian laws. The authorities tend to tolerate the situation. After 10 years, of allowing the Chinese to mind their own business, it seems a little late to interfere now. Reporter Simona Relea decided to see what it was like to land a job in Bucharest’s version of an open Chinese market.

Five minutes. That’s all it took me to get a job at the “Europa” complex. “You start at 7 am and you finish your job at 5 pm. The wages are 2.5 million lei per month (roughly $80).” Without even asking for my ID card, the Chinese woman gasped in astonishment when I asked about an employment contract. “What’s that?” she asked. Meina, “the boss” as I was supposed to call her, barely speaks Romanian, although she has been living here for the last three years. She is highly suspicious and it took several hours dealing with customers before she started talking. “Romanians are really poor and they have no soul,” she told me. “It is very difficult to make money in Romania. You must bribe everybody in order to be able to have your own business.” Meina, who is 38, sells children’s clothing from a stand in Europa. I cannot really tell whether she is ugly or beautiful because to me, all the Chinese look alike. She and her husband receive their merchandise from China, sell it in Romania and send most of the money they make to the two kids she left in China. Just like the other hundreds of other Chinese who run businesses in “Europa” she owns a rusty stand, saved from falling apart completely by strategically placed pieces of wood. Dozens of pieces of children’s clothing are on display, suspended from a string and tied together so they won’t be stolen. Meina doesn’t seem to mind the garbage littered around her stand. She holds on tight to her bag where she keeps her earnings and she refuses to bargain with Romanians. “Damned Chinese woman” the clients say. “Cheap poor Romanians!” she calls them. Two Gipsy waifs, around ten years old, run past her stand. They are quite skinny and they wear rags. Four Chinese chase them screaming “Thieves!”
“The Gypsies are bad,” Meina observes. “They steal a lot. That’s all they do.” Meina watches the Chinese catch the two Gypsies and then beat them. The kids have stolen several pairs of socks from a Chinese merchant and now they cry their hearts out. Everybody watches them but nobody interferes to save the kids from the Chinese’s hands. “You must mind your own business if you want to survive,” Mari, a 17 year old Romanian, who is working in the stand next to mine, tells me. “You shouldn’t care about who gets beaten and who gets killed. It's their problem. It’s between the Gypsies and the Chinese. You’d better stay out of it unless you want trouble. Not even the Gypsies intervene when one of their own is caught stealing. The thief is beaten up and then they start it all over again. They are not afraid of being caught and being beaten. They are used to it. It comes with the territory.” Meina shakes her head: “In our China is no thieves,” she says. “People honest and fairer than here.” I ask her why she left China if everything is so wonderful there. “That not your business!” she barks. By five o’clock Meina starts taking down her things from the stand. She puts them in a storage room behind the stand and locks the door. Then she counts the money. She seems pleased. It has been a good day. She ignores the garbage that has collected around her stand, and she leaves for home. No one in Europa pays attention to the mounds of accumulated garbage. They are accustomed to it. “If nobody else cleans up, why should I?” Meina observes. “In China, different, better…”
I am still curious about why she left China. When Mari and I stop for coffee after work, Mari explains: ”In China all the products are cheap. Here they are more expensive and they make good money that helps them support the children they left back home” she says. “I am lucky, I have a nice Chinese woman for a boss. All I have to do to keep my job is to be nice to the customers. If she sees that you are a good worker and that you sell her goods, there won’t be any problems. There
are some bad Chinese, but you won’t have any trouble with her.” Florin, another Romanian sales helper disagrees: “All the Chinese are bad and cheap, and they make fun of Romanians,” he says. “If you don’t sell enough it is bad. If you are nice to the clients and talk more than them, again, it’s bad. You do not want to be fair to the Chinese. You want to make money on your own. They don’t even know how much they have. When your boss is gone, you can keep 50,000 to 10,000 lei ($1.50 to $3.00) at each sale. The pay is low, anyway. If you ask me, I’d send them all back to China. I am happy that the Gypsies are robbing them”. Florin is 27 and for the past 2 years he has been working for the Chinese. He cannot explain why he hates them so intensely. It may be because, in his own country, he is forced to work for a pittance for foreigners who make more than he does. Florin can’t tell me anything about the stories that regularly appear in Romanian newspapers about brutal crimes involving the Chinese. “We Romanians have nothing to do with their dirty deals,” he says. “It’s better to keep a distance. It’s better not to hear, not to see, not to be interested in what happens here. You keep quiet. You mind your own job and they pay. If they kill each other that has nothing to do with us. It’s their problem.” Mari aagrees, ”After all, I have a job and I am getting paid,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I like the Chinese or whether or not the Chinese love Romanians.”
No one who works in Europa spends much time thinking about whether minorities are being accepted or integrated into Romanian society. No one thinks much about socio-cultural relationships. “Europa” stands for hundreds
of small commercial stalls packed with cheap goods that churn out a livelihood for hundreds of Chinese families. This is where Romanians working for the Chinese can earn enough to get by on too. And it provides revenue for the Gypsies who steal both from the pockets of the Romanian Customers and from the Chinese stalls. In order to survive and to make a living, each group is aware that it needs the others. In fact, in Europa, people work together whether they like each other or they hate each other.

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