ABSTRACT
Yet all of this does not mean that Chinese in Eastern Europe are isolated from their local environments. On the contrary, their connections to it are stronger than those of earlier migrants. Because of the nature of their business, they are in constant touch with locals as customers, business partners, employees (drivers, saleswomen, secretaries, waiters, managers), service providers (accountants, interpreters, lawyers, agents who help with immigration procedures) as well as neighbours. Often there is a special relationship between the Chinese family and the nanny or foster family taking care of their child. The nanny or the secretary would also often be the person to keep in touch with the child’s school, with the doctor, or other institutions. Like other (particularly non-Western) foreigners, Chinese in Eastern Europe face informal discrimination that ranges from selective checks and extortion by police, ticket checking personnel in public transport, customs and public grounds inspectors, to the refusal of landlords to rent them flats and rude treatment in shops. This is most pronounced in Russia, where a strong sense of a need for protection has kept Chinese in ethnic hostels for a long time. An 1998 tax police raid on one of these, Kodun, which resulted in the ‘confiscation’ of so much cash (US $720,000 according to Russian officials) and merchandise (worth US $10 million) whose origin the merchants ‘were not able to document’, was so brutal that it, unusually, provoked a protest from the Chinese embassy and went down in official overseas Chinese history
3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3
some leisure time together, with at least one local.
