Homing pigeon
A personal journey through the Chinatowns of Kolkata, London, and Guatemala City.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
This is an essay I wrote a few years back for The Mekong Review about “Chinatowns” around the world, the different meanings they hold in different places, and the aspirations they represent for different people. Enjoy!
I know a friend who visits McDonald’s in every country he travels to. In doing so, he hopes that some nuance about each place will reveal itself, some nuance that lies in the difference between a McDonald’s that serves Nasi Lemak Burger and a McDonald’s that serves McAloo Tikki Burger. It’s the differences in the pedestrian, rather than the extraordinary, that’s more telling, right?
I get it. I have a similar ritual: I go to Chinatown.
Late last year, I was in Kolkata’s old Chinatown—a commercial quarter in the city centre known as Tiretti Bazaar—to research a story about India’s shrinking Chinese community. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kolkata had been the gateway to the subcontinent for new immigrants who came by sea; and the Chinese here represent the bulk of their settled population in the country.
I was taking pictures at Gee Hing, the only social club in the area that still gets mahjong games going, when a Chinese uncle came up to me. He looked bemused. “You’re a Chinese from Malaysia? Surely you have mahjong at home?”
We do, of course! But it’s the idea of “Chinatown” I’m interested in.
In all the Chinatowns I’ve been to, my curiosity has alternately been welcomed as natural or strange. On the one hand: Alright, you’re an ethnic Chinese. You’re here for a little bit of familiarity in a foreign place. On the other: Wait, you’re one of us. You know what we’re about. Why is this interesting to you?