Sweet and Sour: The Tangled Tale of Kolkata’s Chinese Connections

Sandip Roy

In the early nineties in my small university town in the American Midwest, there was no Indian restaurant. As a newly-arrived immigrant from India when I felt homesick, I would go to the local cheap Chinese restaurant. It felt like the closest thing to home in Kolkata where Chinese food was as much a fixture in our lives as tandoori chicken or the famous spongy Bengali sweet, the rasgolla. Every neighbourhood had a Chinese restaurant. Going out for dinner, a rarity reserved for special occasions, more often than not meant having Chinese. A Chinese meal on New Year’s Day was a ritual whose provenance none of us knew but one we observed with great devotion nonetheless. On that day, the lines outside Bar-B-Q, one of the ritzier Chinese restaurants would spill out onto the street. They still do.

As it turned out, my local midwestern Chinese restaurant delivered almost as much of a culture shock as America itself. It looked familiar with the red and gold lanterns, the gently bobbing good luck cat and fat smiling Buddha but it tasted nothing like the Chinese food that I knew from home. The sweet-and-sour chicken was cloyingly syrupy without the garlicky punch I remembered. The chilli chicken was all crunchy bell-pepper and no green chillis. Most shockingly American chop-suey, a glutinous mass of chow doused in ketchup and topped with a fried egg and crispy noodles was nowhere to be found on the menu. At the end of the meal, I got something I’d never encountered before – an almond-flavoured fortune cookie. I felt a little cheated but I assumed that this was the price of immigration. Even Chinese food could not escape being McDonaldized in America’s great melting pot.

Later I realised, to my chagrin, that while the food at my midwestern Chinese eatery might have been heavily Americanized, the food I’d grown up with was no less inauthentic. Indian Chinese was a beast unto itself, made, as food writer Maria Thomas wrote in Quartz, with a ‘holy trinity’ of ingredients – tomatoes, soy sauce and chilli ‘that offered Indian customers a taste of something they couldn’t often find in local food.’ But at the same time that sour-salty-spicy combination was not that alien to the Indian palate either. An Indian friend who visited China came back aghast. He said, ‘The poor Chinese people have no idea how much better Chinese food tastes in India! Their food is bland!’ A Chinese restauranteur in Kolkata said the first thing she learned was her customers wanted masala in their food.

The story of the Chinese in Kolkata is said to go back to 1778 and a man named Tong Atchew. The English governor-general gave him the rights to set up a sugar mill near Kolkata in return (allegedly) for a chest of tea. Chinese migrants came to work in those mills. The Bengali word for sugar is chini, tracing its roots to those Chinese sugar mills. There is a village named after Tong Atchew to this day – Atchewpur or Achipur. Incense burns at a red tomb dedicated to him though his real grave might have long been washed away. There are no Chinese in Achipur but a temple survives with two deities said to have been brought by Atchew. The area around the temple is still called Chinamantala.

Atchew might have been the ‘first ancestor’ but he didn’t live to see India’s first Chinatown flourish in Calcutta. On a Chinatown walk, you can still see old men playing mahjong; the intricately carved wooden altars to Kuan Yin, the goddess of war and mercy; churches and ginseng shops and street vendors selling barbecued pork and bok choy. But the Chinese restaurants have spread all over the city, and are no longer limited to the boundaries of Chinatown. Eau Chew was started in the 1920s by Achumpa Huang as a low-cost tiffin house for Chinese migrants though it served pork chops and cutlets to cater to European tastes too. It is still housed in a dilapidated old building in central Kolkata perched atop a gas station. A sign points the way up. It also assures its customers that it serves ‘No Beef’. Eau Chew’s most famous dish, named after its current proprietor Josephine Huang, is Josephine Noodles, a mass of noodles with a light gravy topped with fresh vegetables, prawns and meat. 

If Eau Chew had Josephine Noodles, How Hua had its chimney soup, Jimmy’s Kitchen its roasted chilli pork and Beijing its golden fried prawns. Bollywood stars came to Nanking, the city’s oldest Chinese restaurant before it fell on hard times. For a while, its curtained cabins were better known for offering an hour of privacy to courting couples for the price of a plate of noodles. We knew the names of the city’s fabled Chinese restaurants by heart even if we had no idea what any of them meant – Tung Nam, Kim Fa, Chung Wah. Some didn’t sound Chinese at all – Waldorf, Hatari (named after the movie with John Wayne and the baby elephant) and Mini Chinese, a little takeaway presided over by a man who seemed as old as Confucius, and a sign on the wall mirror that warned you sternly not to comb your hair inside in case you wanted to while away the time while waiting for your chilli pork and fried rice.

I like to think of the story of the Chinese in Kolkata as a story of the city’s cosmopolitanism. This is the city where come Christmas, Muslim bakers fire up ovens that you can rent by the hour to bake batches of Christmas cake. This is the city where you can get Jewish cheese samosas and Anglo-Indian mutton mince ball curry and fiery red Devil’s chutney, and a Parsee boarding house still serves authentic Zoroastrian food, fish slathered in spicy green chutney and wrapped in leaves. But of all these communities, the Chinese were the city’s biggest success story. The city still boasts not one but two Chinatowns. Chinese dentists, shoemakers and beauticians were the stuff of legend. There are lion dances during the Lunar New Year, and early in the morning, the streets of Chinatown are filled with women selling wontons and soup and chunky slices of sweet-spicy barbecue pork. A hundred-year-old boarding house, where Chinese bachelors once lodged, part of a neighbourhood club, has gotten reincarnated as a restaurant, Sei Vui. It’s named after a village in Guangzhou from which many of the club members hail. There’s a Chinese newspaper at the reception but when I asked, the man behind the counter admitted he could not read it. He had never been to the ancestral village in Guangzhou. A stone’s throw from a mosque, in a Hindu majority city, the menu promises ‘No Beef, no Pork (Halal)’ – something that would probably leave the good villagers of Sei Vui nonplussed.

Chinese food to me was in some ways the heartwarming tale of how the city could take in the food of the outsider and made it its own dearly beloved. Restaurants that specialise in biryanis and the food of the Mughal emperors have a sideline in fried rice and chilli chicken. Popular eateries that promise homestyle Bengali food made with fish head and chopped banana stems, pungent with mustard oil, also have a Chinese menu. The chow mein has pride of place in Kolkata’s street food. Young men, almost none of them of Chinese origin, set up stalls where egg noodles sizzle in giant woks, tossed with a smattering of slivered onions, cucumber, beetroot and carrot (or what Kolkatans fondly call ‘salad’) and some egg and maybe bits of chicken. They squeeze a bilious green sauce on it and it becomes a filling lunch for office goers. No one questions why a dish that is technically Chinese has become the landmark street food of Kolkata alongside more traditionally Indian fare like kaathi rolls (flour tortillas rolled up with a beaten egg) and phuchkas (crispy wheat puffs stuffed with spicy potatoes and dunked in tart tamarind water).

Chow is no longer Chinese. It is Kolkata’s comfort food and no one cares about MSG. At my local market, Swapan the vegetable seller has bok choy, basil, Chinese cabbage, celery, things outside the norm of a regular Bengali kitchen. ‘Any kind of Chinese vegetable you want, come to me,’ he says grandly. ‘Chinese vegetable’ is his umbrella term which also covers parsley, arugula, red cabbage and lettuce. 

Now, in a more globalised sophisticated world, more ‘authentic’ Chinese food can be found in the city – Hakka versus Cantonese versus Sichuan. Chinese chain restaurants like Chowman have duck festivals in winter, a restaurant called Tak Heng sells diced pork in pickled hamchoi and guo tie potstickers. They are owned by Indians, Bengali businessmen who bring the city the ‘authentic’ flavours of China, while most Chinese-Indians stick to their spiced-up garlicky Indian-Chinese concoctions. They are the loyal guardians of that Chindian cuisine, the product of an encounter between East and East. Only lately a Jessie Yung’s Kitchen is attracting notice for being a Chinese restaurant that offers ‘authentic’ Chinese food like bak kut teh rib soup and braised lu rou pork (and no American chop suey).

It’s a story of give and take, one that pooh-poohs the fetishisation of authenticity. Chinese food in India is mongrel food, the product of spice and miscegenation, and unashamed of it. Chinese takeaway from the days of my childhood came with three little sachets of sauces – one fiery orange, the other an olive green and one sachet of chilli bits floating in a pool of vinegar. Whetstone magazine says Pou Chong, a Chinese sauce manufacturer now into its fourth generation, invented that spicy green sauce. Now that same green chilli sauce has become an essential ingredient in the very non-Chinese egg kaathi rolls sold on street corners. Meanwhile, Pou Chong has its own line of kashundi, a Bengali mustard.  

Even more culturally fascinating is the story of the Manchurian chicken, a history that has nothing to do with Manchuria. Nelson Wang was a third-generation Chinese chef in Kolkata who was also a part-time limbo dancer. When he started working in Mumbai, he invented his own Indo-Chinese concoction where he dredged chicken cubes in cornflour and fried them before tossing them into a thick sauce of onions, ginger garlic, soy and vinegar. It became the signature dish of his restaurant China Garden and beyond. His signature dish expanded to paneer Manchurian, cauliflower Manchurian and shredded cabbage balls Manchurian. On a trip to the town of Badami in Karnataka, best known for its exquisite cave temples dating back to the 6th century, I did not see a single Chinese person but there were food carts selling Manchurian gobi (cauliflower), each one misspelt more colourfully than the previous one, were everywhere. According to local food bloggers, Manchurian gobi was, for some reason, the iconic dish of the area.

Chinese food was a pivotal part of coming of age in Kolkata. It was a safe way to encounter the exotic in our middle-class life. The first time my sister and I went out to have a meal at a restaurant on our own, without our parents, we went to Mandarin, the local Chinese restaurant where you can still get dishes by the ‘half-plate.’ In a fit of adventurousness, we ordered a dish with bamboo shoots, something we’d never eaten before. We found its briny taste a bit off-putting, a little medicinal, but being on a strict budget there was no way to order anything else. A little older and a little more flush, we would go to Jimmy’s Kitchen, a dark cave of a restaurant where you could order a beer or a rum and cola alongside your roasted chilli pork and feel decadently grown-up. It was more than food. In our circumscribed lives in a socialist country where even Coca Cola and Pepsi were not available, Chinese food was our passport to a wider world. It allowed us to feel a sense of sophistication, one that we could bring home in a soya sauce bottle. Our refrigerators were filled with half-used desiccated remains of plastic sachets of Chinese chilli sauces, remnants of long-ago takeaways, carefully preserved like mementos from exciting adventures.

My sense of pride in Kolkata’s love affair with Chinese food was rudely shattered as an adult at a dinner party. At the home of a Jewish friend, one of the last handful of Jews left in Kolkata, one of the guests was a Chinese woman. She was introduced as a researcher who was studying the internment of thousands of Indians of Chinese origin in a camp in the deserts of Rajasthan in western India after a brief war between India and China in 1962. I was stunned. I had no idea that there was this dark history underlying the noodles and fried rice I’d grown up on.

The war had lasted barely three weeks. The internees languished in camp for up to four years. Dilip D’Souza and Joy Ma, herself a child of the internment camps, recently wrote a book about it – The Deoliwallahs. Some 3000 people were picked up, bundled into a train and shipped across the country to Deoli camp in the deserts of Rajasthan. ‘Many had been here for generations. They were in fact really Indian. They just looked Chinese,’ said D’Souza. He found out that story much as I did. He had a good friend, an Indian of Chinese origin, who would visit his mother every few months. Once, while chatting, she had casually mentioned this history. ‘I was baffled,’ said D’Souza. ‘I thought this was only something the Americans did to the Japanese and the Nazis did to the Jews and [sic].’ Unlike in America, no civil rights groups protested.  There was never an apology. Even after being released from camp, the Chinese needed to register with the authorities, and their movements were restricted. At the end of it, there is no record of any Chinese spies being found as a result of this internment, not one. 

But for the Chinese in India, the scars never went away. The real reason the Chinatowns of Kolkata emptied out was the memory of those camps. At its height, there were some 20,000 Chinese there. Now less than 2000 remain and fast dwindling. Michael Cheng, an internee, told me how they had waged a legal battle for thirty years to get back their old restaurant after they returned from the camp. They won it but by then his brothers had all left India. His father who had been taken to camp handcuffed like a common felon never quite recovered his dignity. Cheng lives in North Carolina. ‘We left the country because of mistrust,’ he said. ‘Otherwise today we might still be Indian.’ That suspicion flared up again after Covid-19 became the ‘Chinese virus’ and a government minister asked Indians to avoid Chinese food and Chinese restaurants. Tathagata Neogy, who runs a city walking tour company called Heritage Walk Kolkata (now called Immersive Trails), told me people even came up with t-shirts that said in Bengali that they were Indians from Kolkata and not Chinese. He called them a ‘perfect example of how Calcutta has assimilated communities for generations.’ Yet it was also proof of how little it takes to rip it all apart and bring back memories of camps from almost 60 years ago. 

Yin Marsh who lived in those camps talked about how they would try and cook congee in stoves fired with scrap wood they had collected. The ash from that wood became their soap. The caustic substances in that ash peeled the skin off their fingers so by the time they left camp, many had no fingerprints at all. It seemed like a chapter of history that had vanished from our collective consciousness leaving literally no fingerprints behind. Monica Liu was a child of those camps. Now she’s one of Kolkata’s most famous Chinese restaurateurs – a brusque stocky no-nonsense matron in a flowered dress rattling off instructions in Hindi to her workers. She told me that to this day there are some vegetables she cannot eat – potatoes and lauki (a kind of bottle gourd). ‘For five and a half years I was eating that only. I don’t want to smell that even.’ When they were released, they had no money. She remembered her father took them to an old Chinese restaurant near the bus stand of the town they had grown up in. It was a day after the Lunar New Year and the owner fed them rice with seven kinds of vegetables. ‘I will never forget those seven vegetables,’ said Liu. Her mother started selling dumplings to make ends meet. Liu now owns five bustling restaurants. For a while, she even had an Indian restaurant in Shanghai.

But she still has a copy of the old identity cards from camp. Hers was number 880. Her mother was 879. Her father was 878. She said she didn’t want to look back, she didn’t even expect an apology. ‘What is sorry? Just a common word, like a small wind blowing on your skin. Whatever we had was already gone. I don’t want to remember the bad thing that happened to us. But no one will ever forget. It always remains.’ As I got up to leave, Monica Liu, smiled and said ‘Please do not leave without having lunch. As my guest.’

That day the sweet-sour-salty taste of Kolkata Chinese food I had grown up loving had a bitter aftertaste I had never noticed before.