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. The differences in the pedestrian, rather than the extraordinary, are 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 city centre commercial quarter 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 Chinese 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. But it’s the idea of “Chinatown” I’m interested in.

• Tags: Chinatown, Emily Ding, Issue 15