Meanwhile, Tangra is best known for Chinese restaurants such as Beijing, Ah Leung, Kim Ling and Golden Joy (Tseng's family favourite). By 05:30, vendors are ready with tall, cylindrical aluminium steamers filled with pork buns, chicken momos and fishball soup. Sunday morning Chinese breakfast at Sun-Yat Sen street in Tiretta Bazar is a beloved ritual for many Kolkata locals, who go for the fresh dumplings, wontons and noodles served at the makeshift street stalls. Pou Chong foods has also started making Indian sauces such as pudina (mint), kasundi (the Bengali version of mustard) and a chilli chicken sauce – all loved equally by Kolkata's Indians as well as Chinese locals. The addition of local spices and sauces gave birth to dishes like chilli chicken (using dark soy sauce) and gobi manchurian (fried cauliflower florets tossed in corn starch and spices), totally unheard of in mainland China. "They added green chilli, onions, coriander powder and even garam masala… to each their own," he noted pragmatically. Tseng, who grew up with what he calls the "mild flavours" of traditional Hakka food at home, said that cooks had to improvise to please Indian palates. All of them came to Kolkata then for trade or business," he said. "The Chinese first settled in an area between the Bengali town and European town, where other foreigners like the Armenians and Greeks, as well as non-Bengalis such as the Marwaris and Parsis lived. Kolkata blogger Rangan Datta, who has been documenting local heritage for many years now, explained that a large chunk of the population was forced to move to a marshy area that used to be outside the main town when pollution-causing tanneries were shifted out of Tiretta Bazar in central Kolkata. And while India still doesn't have any other Chinatowns, Kolkata counts not one, but two: the original one at Tiretta Bazar that has existed since the 1800s and the settlement created later at Tangra in the early 1900s. While cities like San Francisco and London are known for their Chinatowns, Kolkata's has remained under the radar. But their culture is visible everywhere in the Tiretta (also called Tiretti) Bazar and Tangra neighbourhoods: in the street food vendors, the Taoist temples and community clubs, as well as the annual lion dances to welcome the Lunar New Year. Today, there are barely 2,000 people of Chinese origin left in Kolkata. Kolkata's original Chinatown is still called Cheenapara. Lee explained that it was Ah Chew's association with sugar – " chini" in many Indian languages including Bengali – that gave rise to the still-prevalent Indian word for Chinese people, best captured in the popular diplomatic slogan of the 1950s, " Hindi Chini bhai bhai" (Indians and Chinese are brothers). Here, they intermarried and integrated with locals, learning to speak Bengali and Hindi fluently. The city's Chinese population swelled to more than 20,000 in the early 20th Century when many fled China to escape its civil war and conflict with Japan to find work in the tanning and leather industries. As an eastern port, Kolkata was the closest entry into India from China and East Asia, so this became India's only Chinese community. India's first Chinese immigrant, Tong Ah Chew (Atchew, according to British records), arrived in Kolkata with loads of tea in 1778 and set up a sugar mill near the city. Lee is a fifth-generation Indian Chinese of Hakka origin, and works at Pou Chong Foods, a business started by her grandfather in 1958 to supply Chinese sauces and noodles to other Chinese residents. When she told me, "I felt at ease only when I finally got back", she was referring to her home in Kolkata. Not being able to fit into a foreign culture may not sound that strange – except that Lee is of Chinese origin herself. "I couldn't speak the language, I didn't like the food and I felt very lost," she recalled. When Janice Lee went on holiday to China, she found that she couldn't wait for it to end.
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