I had no idea how sprawling Chinese diaspora was until I was in Ecuador and a sailor on the boat with me took me to a Chinese restaurant. In Ecuador. Of course there would be a Chinese restaurant in Ecuador, but of course there's also a sailor on my US-flagged ship who's ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin. And so we ordered Chinese in Chinese, in a Spanish-speaking country. In 1999.
The dominican republic is covered in "Pica Pollo" restaurants and they are often run by chinese people. The main food at pica pollo is fried chicken and sometimes they also serve dominican beans and rice. The only asian dish is fried rice called "cho fan" in spanish. It wasn't until years later that I learned cho fan is just "chǎofàn" spoken with a spanish accent.
I saw lots of chinese people at Pica Pollos across the country, but never saw them outside the restaurants and don't know much about where they live or what life is like for them in the DR. I'm not sure if each pica pollo is run by a chinese family that lives on site at the restaurant.
Amsterdam, Vancouver and lots of other big cities have a large enough Chinese population that there can be whole districts that are mostly Chinese. To the point where the street signs are in Chinese.
I always like to reference the moment I saw on tv in Vancouver interviewing an old lady who was so immersed in her enclave she referred to white people as foreigners.
