When we grow up together it is difficult to say that we are different
Shuyi Yang was born in 1991 in the city of Wenzhou, China, and came to Italy when he was 10 years old to be reunited with his family. He currently lives in Turin, where he grew up, studied and now works. He speaks Italian, English and Chinese “in that order, in the sense that the language I know best is Italian”.
When he arrived here as a child, the impact “was a shock, however, being young makes you more adaptable to change“. Today he has an Italian girlfriend and with his parents speaks mostly Italian, not Chinese: “I often start a sentence in Chinese and finish it in Italian, because inside my head they are equivalent“.
“I didn’t choose Italy, my parents told me to take the plane and come”. Today, however, he would not move to live elsewhere, because he feels “half Chinese and half Italian”: Chinese because of his values of origin, and Italian because of his lifestyle.
“Having experienced childhood in a different context and then having worked with different people and in different environments allows me to always have another point of view as well. The environment transforms us, but we can act on it, transforming it. We try to change our surroundings, and the moment we do that we change ourselves; it is a mutual exchange in which we both gain”.
In Italy, Shuyi went to a scientific high school and in 2016 he graduated in Probability and Statistics from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Turin. At the same time, he earned a master’s degree in Economics from Collegio Carlo Alberto. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Modeling Data Science at the University of Turin, a subject he is passionate about and described as “a mix of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Basically, you try to extract values from data to create machine learning algorithms”. Shuyi was also a research assistant at Bocconi and is now a Data Scientist at Intesa Sanpaolo, where he works as an artificial intelligence expert. It has been many years since he last visited his hometown, and Shuyi plans to return there especially to visit the many relatives waiting for him.
“China is a very large country of which I know a very small part: the Chinese come from a millennia-old tradition that is very different from that of the West“.
From the end of World War II to the present, China has experienced momentous changes: from widespread illiteracy to an excess of college graduates. In Chinese culture, education and training are fundamental life values. Parents are ready to give up many things as long as their children have the right education: “If you ask an Italian parent what he would give his children, he would probably say ‘all the love in the world,’ if you ask a Chinese family, they would say ‘the best education possible’ “. A way of interpreting the world that according to Shuyi greatly differentiates Italians from the Chinese.
In conclusion, Shuyi is keen to add that he has never experienced any incidents of discrimination in Italy, either socially or at work, although he does not rule out that this problem exists. “I am convinced that Italians are open people, and that in the future the integration will improve a lot. I grew up with my Italian peers, my children will grow up with their Italian peers, and when you grow up together it is difficult to say that we are different”.
