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Chinatown Days by Rita Chowdhury

Sometimes a door will open unexpectedly. A door through which we enter an unimaginable past – a past that is enmeshed with our present.

There was once a thriving Chinese-Assamese community in Assam with many of its members being the descendants of tea garden workers who had been brought to India by the British in slave-like conditions. That community, as an author learns, rarely knew of any home but India. Nonetheless, it was torn asunder by the 1962 Indo-Chinese war and, in uncovering the story of the community, the author learns his own tale.