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

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred 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-...