As one family struggles to open a Chinatown grocery, neighborhood food scarcity persists

Chinatown has always been a North Star in Jessica Wang’s life. Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley with her parents, both Taiwanese immigrants, Wang remembers regularly attending First Chinese Baptist Church on Yale Street with her family.

Then, after church, they’d eat.

“I knew we were gonna have dim sum,” Wang said, “or amazing, huge platters of fried rice.”

The neighborhood never quite left Wang’s periphery. Even after stints on the East Coast for art school and in San Francisco for a restaurant gig at Michelin-starred State Bird Provisions, she felt the pull to return to Chinatown.

Since moving back to L.A. in 2014, Wang has vended at local farmers markets, hosted Chinese cooking demos at public libraries and helped staff Filipino restaurant Lasita, a crown jewel of Chinatown’s Far East Plaza.

More recently, Wang has focused on opening her own storefront, Gu Grocery, on North Broadway.

If all goes according to plan, Gu Grocery will help close a deepening food scarcity gap in Chinatown. The neighborhood’s last full-service grocery stores, Ai Hoa and G&G markets, closed permanently in 2019. One of the few remaining markets, produce specialist Yue Wa, followed suit last year after an 18-year run.

“[My mom] was losing a lot of business relationships because people were moving out of Chinatown,” said Derek Luu, whose mother Amy Tran owned Yue Wa. “Now that the store is gone, a lot of her previous customers have complained that they cannot get the same quality or types of fruits and veggies.”

Today, street vendors line Broadway, setting up place mats and selling small quantities of fruits and vegetables. But without access to refrigeration, these vendors lack the broader inventory of a storefront like Gu Grocery, where Wang plans to sell an assortment of fresh produce and healthy pre-packaged meals cooked by her and her mom.

Like Yue Wa, Gu Grocery will operate as a small corner store rather than a full-service grocery. But the goal is to improve food access for vulnerable residents, Wang said.

Food scarcity in Chinatown hits elderly and low-income residents particularly hard, with one in four residents above the age of 65 and 30% of households living below the poverty line.

Smart & Final is a 10-minute bus ride away in Lincoln Heights. But as a hub for Chinese and other Asian immigrants, residents often seek out culturally aligned supermarkets like 99 Ranch. Founded by Taiwanese immigrant Roger Chen in Westminster in 1984, it’s now the largest Asian supermarket chain in the country. The closest 99 Ranch supermarkets to Chinatown typically require a car ride to Monterey Park or Alhambra — a trek many elders can’t make on their own.

Two years into its five-year lease, Gu Grocery is struggling to open. Construction is the main cause for the delay: An architect never submitted plans to the city and then fell ill; a lead contractor abandoned Wang to pursue bigger projects; drywall installation was pushed back by a month after Wang was told that subcontractors were detained by ICE.

Inspections have been a frustrating ordeal, Wang says, pointing out that the city often sends different inspectors to follow up on the same issues. When an initial inspector asked her to replace a costly piece of HVAC equipment, she complied. A few weeks later, a different inspector conducted a follow-up and pointed out new issues to resolve.

“I don’t have any hard evidence of it, but it seems like [gatekeeping],” Wang said. “It almost feels like we’re not being taken seriously as human beings with needs. Like, we’re just being taken through this crazy obstacle course where they have all these rules that flip-flop on us.”

Amid the setbacks, Wang’s dad stepped in as a contractor and Wang’s mom volunteered to serve as construction liaison. Wang has used up a $200,000 county grant and nearly $20,000 raised from a GoFundMe campaign. In light of the unforeseen delays, landlord Jason Fujimoto granted Wang’s request for a rent freeze, so she has not paid rent since February.

Jessica Wang and her parents Peggy and Willie Wang greet Chinatown residents outside of their storefront Gu Grocery.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Fujimoto, whose great-great-grandparents helped found Chinatown generations ago, said he is confused by the hold-up.

“It’s a little discouraging,” Fujimoto said. “We want a business here. We want people from the community, or tourists, to come over and be able to buy from her store, and create that sense of community and foot traffic in the neighborhood.”

George Yu, who serves as executive director for Chinatown’s Business Improvement District and owns Far East Plaza, is apprehensive about Gu Grocery’s business trajectory. A walking dictionary of Chinatown, Yu has been vocal about how “the older, poorer residents just can’t sustain a market.” Instead, Yu says he sees restaurants as the key to revitalizing the neighborhood. He has championed the success of his own Far East Plaza by inviting in a new wave of restaurant tenants like Lasita.

“We wouldn’t be in Chinatown if it weren’t for him,” said Jack Benchakul, owner of minimalist coffee shop Endorffeine. “When I was running a pop-up coffee cart for another coffee shop, we had our first interaction and that’s when he invited us to come and take a look at Chinatown.”

In 2013, Yu backed the opening of a controversial Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market, telling The Times that, “Chinatown residents have been waiting for decades for a grocery store in that location.” The 34,000-square-foot market closed in 2016 as part of a global corporate restructuring that shut down 269 stores. Today, the shopping center is home to senior apartments, a gym and fast-casual chains Papa John’s and Subway.

Yu, who said he’s spoken with his and Wang’s mutual acquaintances to offer help for Gu Grocery, noted that he hasn’t been approached by the mom-and-pop team. But he favors Wang’s tea eggs, which remind him of the ones he ate growing up in Taiwan.

“I promise you, I will spend a lot of money there,” Yu said.

In the meantime, remaining markets offer patchy selections of fruits and vegetables. There’s a fish market, and three poultry shops. On Thursday afternoons, L.A. River Farmers’ Market is hosted at L.A. State Historic Park.

“It is definitely not an alternative to a full-service grocery store that’s open seven days a week,” said market manager Elise Dang, whose family owns a Chinatown houseware store called J Enterprises, “but it serves as one of the resources that residents can access.”

Dang acknowledged the future of the L.A. River Farmers’ Market is dependent on how the city’s gondola project develops, which would dominate the park and destroy dozens of trees with a gondola to and from Dodger Stadium.

Vendors are also mixed about the market’s success. Daniel Bohlson of L.A. Mushroom Culture said he earns up to 50% less at River Farmers’ Market compared with sales at other L.A. farmers markets due to sparse foot traffic. Likewise, Peter Chang, who runs the booth for local tea company Chafolio, said he notices 25% less sales at the market.

Chang lives in Rowland Heights, a community in the San Gabriel Valley where more than 60% of residents identify as Asian.

“You’ve got these very amazing Chinese supermarkets that have anything you can want or imagine from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan,” Chang said.

The opposite is true in Chinatown, where the older generations are stuck with dwindling food access.

Lynn Nguyen, Chinatown’s young adult librarian, has taken to delivering groceries door to door since 2022. In late July, Nguyen and her teenage volunteers dragged wagons of groceries provided by Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez’s office to residents living in single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs.

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1. Chinatown librarian Lynn Nguyen leads a group of teens in packing and delivering a variety of fresh produce and food to people in need throughout Chinatown. 2. Volunteers pack and deliver a variety of fresh produce and food. 3. Food is distributed to Chinatown residents living in single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Residents of SROs pay affordable rent to live in 80- to 100-square-foot rooms often shared with up to three other family members, with communal bathrooms and kitchens. Some have been known to lack basic necessities like air conditioning or running water.

“I’m hoping that by opening Gu, we can invite people to participate in this social enterprise,” Wang said. “It is a for-profit business model, but the idea is for us to be able to take care of each other.”

With no opening date in sight, Wang said she is motivated by a practice emphasized in traditional Chinese culture, where the younger generation shoulders the responsibility of caring for their elders.

“In my own family, my parents have always been caretakers of their own parents,” she said. “I’ve been raised with that in me, to want to care for elderly people in our communities. Like we’re all one big, extended family.”