Greece’s Chinatowns

By: Angela Tang

In Greece’s Chinatowns, I saw Chinese immigrants traversing the streets but not in a flashy red-lantern-golden-gate-fortune-cookie-boba-drinks type of way but in a more waking-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn-and-opening-up-shop-and-smoking-a-cigarrette type of way. The Chinese immigrants in Greece were more lowkey. I was thinking this when I walked through the streets in the summer of 2026.

Back in the hostel I was staying at, I met an octogenarian who was from Shandong Province in China. He told me that he was planning to travel to a different country every four months. He wanted to “探索世界”, or explore the world. I asked him if he wanted to come with me to eat dinner at the Chinese restaurant down the street.

“Why would I want to eat Chinese food when I am on vacation in Greece?” he asked me. “I can eat Chinese food all the time when I am back home. I’m here to try Greek cuisine," he said.

“Well, the restaurant owner himself is Chinese,” I replied.

“Even more reason to not go,” he huffed.

It seemed that there was a discrepancy between the Chinese who came to Greece out of necessity and the Chinese who came to Greece for travel and enjoyment. And I found myself in the middle. I didn’t have the money to travel luxuriously, but I also wasn’t traveling to Greece out of a total lack and means of survival.

In the streets of Athens, I was constantly searching for anything Chinese. I looked around for what I could pinpoint as Chinese accents because there was no clear demarcation of where the Chinatown started and where it ended. The Chinese neighborhoods had not been fully established like in the Chinatowns in New York or in Boston. 

Sometimes, a Chinese merchant would see me and stop me first. 
They could somehow sniff that I was not a Chinese immigrant from Greece but rather a Chinese immigrant from the United States.

They would ask me if I wanted to buy whatever it was they were selling—chicken feet, marinated pork liver, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. I would hesitate and then give in to the light pressure. The guilt of a tourist, exploring and consuming and the least I could do was circulate my money. The merchant would ask me where I was from, and I would tell them Texas. The conversation would sometimes continue from there, the topic moving from guns, did people really carry them in their pockets like cellphones?, to land, how much land did people own? Was there a lot of it?, and Trump.

I didn’t come from a very Chinese background. If anything, the only memories I had of China were from the photos my parents took with them to the United States when we immigrated to Texas when I was three years old. The Chineseness I knew came from a distance. I would hear the stories from my parents sitting on our living room couch in a suburb of Dallas, learn Chinese inside a Texas public school on a Sunday afternoon, and eat Chinese fast food with a fork. But this was all done in Texas, very far from the origin.

I was curious to see what the Greek Chinese replication of China was like. And I was surprised that it was more of a lived-in than an adorned setting. The style of Chineseness wasn’t an exterior motif that started from the outside in, but the opposite. I would see unassuming restaurant buildings, hardly any Chineseness in their exteriority, but as soon as I walked inside, the familiar smells of Chinese cuisine would greet me.

In the town of Istiaia, I met a Chinese family who owned a department store. They lived on the second floor of the building, and I was invited to eat lunch with them on a slow afternoon. The hospitality of the family made me nostalgic of the gatherings I had with my own family. Rather than being offended when I saw the kids bring out their cellphones on the kitchen table watching an episode of a TV show, I found myself relaxing and sitting back. Food was best enjoyed when everyone was enjoying it at their own pace and not forced to keep a stable conversation. Even though it was my first and only time sharing a meal with this family, the lunch felt natural, nothing special, and that’s what made it feel so memorable to me as I write about this now.

Chinatowns are places that are real and imaginary at the same time. Architectural historian and San Francisco native Phil Choy writes that Chinatowns are often built to look "Chinese" based on Western, not traditional Chinese, concepts to boost tourism. And this observation is certainly true in most Chinatowns across the United States today that have shifted from affordable residential communities to tourist hotspots that displace the actual Chinese people living there. However, in my meanderings around Athen’s Chinatowns, I was impressed by the lack of attraction and need for adornment. The places of Chinese living in Athens were marked with a sense of ease. There was no ulterior motive of trying to attract more visitors. The living spaces and restaurants were built to serve those who lived there and nothing else. And I felt appreciative that these places welcomed me so casually—without the pomp and circumstance of red pagoda roofs or dragon gates, but with the warmness of a relative who acknowledges your presence like they just saw you the other day down the street buying sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves.

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Angela Tang (she/her) is a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction. She grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Williams College with an Art History degree and a focus in printmaking. She spent most of her twenties working as a youth organizer in Asian American nonprofits in New York and Washington, D.C.