My wife and I went to one last week. The seafood and meat departments were impressive, and the rice selection is great -- but it didn't wow us like this article hypes. We still think 99 Ranch is a better Asian grocery store. That was our first impression, anyway.
The quality of grocery stores can vary within the same chain. My wife and I usually shop at the Ranch 99 that's local to us, but there's another one about 40 minutes away that has a better selection. Or at least, a slightly different selection. We also shop at H-Mart, Lotte and Great Wall. Each of those tends to have at least a few items we like that the others don't typically stock.
I thought 99 Ranch would be the grocer that “sparked an Asian American revolution” as the article suggests. 99 Ranch started expanding back in the 80s and had a lot of what the author mentioned.
No. Searching for this phrase reveals that it is not used outside of this article, except in a literal context (e.g. “across Asia”). It is a strange and inept description, and the NYT would likely shadow-edit it if someone were to raise the question of what Asia has to do with being wide.
I visited one with my partner and a few friends - luckily they were on a timetable or we would have been lost in there for eons. My favorite part of the haul was frozen durian, some great earthy oolong, and 8 pommelos.
This article prompted me to discover that there are also several H Marts within NYC!
I used to live across the street from a Food Bazaar. Moved last year to a different area in Brooklyn and now there's no Food Bazaar or H Mart within a reasonable distance of me. CTown just doesn't compare.
HMart's great. Good food court with a variety of cusines. Nice prepackaged take home food. Tons of free samples pre-covid. Huge section of dumplings. Lots of niche asian things you have trouble finding elsewhere, like dashi and what not. Check it out if you have one nearby. To those unfamiliar with asian cuisines, try grabbing some kimbap (~korean sushi), korean bbq sauce, dashi (~umami soup base), hot sesame oil, gochujang paste, a fuck ton of noodles, etc.
This article puts a large emphasis on race relations but honestly I think the anti-asian voice is very small. Certainly an order of magnitude smaller than what arabs a decade prior. Casually looking up stats on the FBI hate crime database (2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table...), asian hate crimes are an order magnitude less than black/african american hate crimes. I've seen stats suggestings a 100%+ increase in rates for asian americans in the past year, but that still puts it at a relatively lower number than other groups.
Idk. As an aggressively liberal asian american living in a heavily blue area full of BLM and other progressive movements, this one doesn't resonate with me as the cultural emergency it's being shaped as. This could be local bias, but I don't believe the sentiment towards asians for the median, or even 90th percentile individual has changed that much. I don't know if I believe the local experience of the median asian has changed all that much either.
As a non-chinese, I'm also annoyed at the lack of differentiation between Asian and Chinese- and then further from Chinese descent vs. CCP supporter. If there is any growing anti asian sentiment, it's almost entirely due to the actions of the CCP. If trends continue in this direction, I foresee a push to stop using the term Asian. Many (most?) Asian cultures consider the CCP to be a hostile nation and likely won't tolerate being lumped in with them.
An acquaintance of mine mentioned that in college, she was involved in a college group that was trying to organize against anti-Asian violence, and there ended up being so little of it that they had to reorient to being a volunteer organization.
I'm also pretty liberal, but it feels like the NYT has decided it's their role to litigate the culture war. I really don't love it. Being driven to substack a la Taibbi and Greenwald, because it's not like going and reading Breitbart or whatever is going to give me better info.
I lean traditional[1], not Conservative (TM), and I find Breitbart just as insufferable as MSNBC or CNN. They’re all using the same formula of eliciting emotional responses and using them to assign and cement opinions to their victims.
I don’t agree with their political beliefs, but I find Taibbi and Greenwald readable. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is exactly, but you can tell they have far more intellectual respect for their readers than the mainstream propagandists do.
Your last paragraph I get it but I think that's also a sign of racism? Like say I'm Russian because I kinda am, no one holds me accountable for Putin's actions. The geopolitical positioning of Russia's regime at any given moment doesn't affect how safe I feel in my current country, doesn't affect how strangers feel about me.
The fact that it does for some chinese-americans and other asians.... I'm not sure exactly what it says but there is something there and I don't think it's benign.
Of course, but there needs to be a way to say, for example, Russia is a hostile state without being seen as prejudiced against people of Russian descent.
If someone says anti-asian ideals are on the rise, I think it's important to unpack that to say it is caused primarily by the ccp. Many people are anti-ccp but not anti-asian, likely including, a majority of non-chinese southeast asians. Having that conversation is how you remove vague racist sentiments and encourage a focus on actual political entities.
Yes, people often fail and just use visual cues. But historically there have been differences. E.g. the original american views on japan were that of a refined civilization and sort of honorary white Asian vs. the chinese, which is all sorts of fucked up, but serves to highlight that even dumbass racially driven views can have nuance.
To me the GP look like just a thinly veiled “F-word [nationality] [noun]s can go home but some with [judgmental criteria] are good”... Rivalry is strong among East Asian countries. It probably isn’t causing cognitive dissonance in GP for using racist narratives against Asian categories while identifying as an Asian.
I don't suppose the irony is lost upon you that you're using a stereotype of Asians to justify asserting that I'm racist. Consider a good faith interpretation in which I don't think anyone needs to good home because I didn't say anything like that.
Assuming you're a liberal American, how do you feel about conservative media saying the country needs to be protected from anti-american sentiment in europe for trump being an idiot some time ago? Is it possible you thought "Actually I dislike trump too, he's not my president, and I shouldn't be held accountable for him?" Do you accept generalizations about Americans using subsets that you find abhorrent? Have you never said "there's large differences between the red and blue states, it's not all like that"?
I certainly said things like that a lot, and at the end of the day, I think the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP are worse than those of trump.
The idiotic practice of lumping Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian people together as “Asians”, as if the term had any kind of cultural relevance, is mainly a tic of journalists. For the most part, normal people don’t talk or think this way.
Asia is a big continent, and often Pacific Islanders are also thrown in with the jumbo term. Africans probably also feel weird when we bucket everyone from their continent under a single African label.
It is in fact "Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month" in the US right now. So go ahead and celebrate with some dumplings and a side of poi?
African as a label becomes even stranger when mixed with American. African-American is usually used as a synonym for Black American, despite not all Africans being Black. An Egyptian-American likely would not be called African-American.
It’s worse than that. I’ve heard black Africans living in Africa, who have never been to any country in the Americas, referred to as “African American” by people who think—well, who knows what they think? Americans are insane when it comes to “race”.
At some point in time, some portion of popular culture deemed “black” as a descriptor of people with certain skin tones and cultural background in the US was derogative and pushed for switching to “African American”, even though it can cause confusion.
Russia is also in Asia, but you rarely hear them called Asians. Indians are rarely lumped in either. Lumping dissimilar peoples together never made much sense to me - even Continents are arbitrary divisions.
There are some Russians that look really Mongolian (and probably are close to Mongolian ethnically), and of course pass for East Asians. There is a lot of land between Novosibirsk and Vladivostok.
In the US, people refer to descendants of East Asia (China/Korea/Japan/similar looking) by Asian. In the UK, Asian means descendants of South Asia (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Nepali).
My girlfriend's mom is Cambodian with Chinese ancestry. One time she was describing a pickled cabbage preparation from her home village, and I responded with "oh, so kind of like Korean kimchi?" and her response was "yeah, but Asian-style."
In her mind, "Asia" specifically means China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Thailand.
I have questioned the narrative of rising anti-Asian hate in the US ever since I read an HN-linked editorial on the subject in a major American newspaper by an Asian-American, and he included supposed microaggressions in the count of hateful actions against Asians. For example, noticing that someone has a relatively uncommon surname in North America (like Nguyen) and asking if that someone was related to someone else they knew with the same surname, was, according to him, microaggressive. This felt like such a reach made in order to claim there was an emergency going on.
I think that counts as a microaggression, in that it's a papercut to someone that builds up over time that a member of the majority culture would not experience (you wouldn't ask a John Smith if they're related to some other Smith). Isn't that what microaggressions are? Something that by itself is innocuous, but when it's the 20th time in a week you're asked the question, it starts being annoying.
Yet people of the dominant race in the USA with an uncommon surname get asked the same questions, so viewing this as specifically anti-Asian sentiment is, as I said, a reach. Annoying behavior is not necessarily intentionally racist behavior or to be included in a supposedly rising incidence of what is specifically labeled "hate".
The point of a microaggression is that it's part of the constant pressure of not being part of the "dominant race". You can't do a microaggression to a white person because there's no hierarchy where you're above them to reassert.
This is false. The white person may be a member of an ethnicity seen as non-dominant. For example, his surname is unusual because it is typical of Muslim peoples but not for historically Christian whites, as for many immigrants to the USA from the former Yugoslavia or Albania. Yet unless the person asking about the surname is intentionally targeting that ethnicity, the behavior cannot reasonably be called anti-Muslim racism, let alone used as proof of a rising incidence of what is specifically termed "hate".
The problem with Nguyen is that while among white people, it's an uncommon name, among other populations it's INCREDIBLY COMMON, which isn't common knowledge. I think this a pretty negligible example though. Nowhere near as egregious as wondering if people are related because they're just the same race.
Hierarchy I don't believe is the right term. The homogeniety of norms is what matter. White women have surely encountered microaggressions. Non-normative white men as well. Honestly everybody differs from the norm in some way. The magnitude and frequency are what make it matter.
Someone thinking your last name implies kinship is whatever. Someone thinking you're a secretary because you're a black woman when you're the CEO is a big big problem.
People mispronounce my last name constantly. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say it right the first time, and pretty often they say it wrong even after I correct them. Should this be considered a microaggression? Not a rhetorical question, but an honest inquiry from someone who doesn't tend to think in terms of aggressions/microaggressions
It depends on definitions. Hate crimes against asians are increasing. They're still relatively rare. Are more people becoming anti-asian? Or are the usual suspects just being more vocal in the last gasps of trumpism? Are we able to differentiate anti-asian hate from hostility towards the CCP?
Isn't that expected because there's an order of magnitude less asians? Not to mention that the people targeted with this wave of violence are probably east asians which are a subset of all asians.
This is just spitballing, but I would think the number of hate crime committers is far more important than the number of potential hate crime victims. There's likely to be far more potential victims than actual victims in any given locale. Of course there's going to be some confounding effects here.
edit: that is, adding one violent white nationalist will increase anti asian violence far more than adding one asian person.
As another non-Chinese Asian, really? You don’t want to be lumped in with the Chinese so it’s easier to know who the “bad ones” are?
I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.
It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now. The people who want to hate Asians will find a reason.
It might be interesting to compare the treatment of Italian-Americans and German-Americans to Japanese-Americans in WW1 and WW2. Relatively few Italian and German-Americans were interned in comparison. Meanwhile, the hostility towards Japanese-Americans spilled over to Chinese-Americans despite China being invaded and allied with the US, leading to Chinese-Americans having to explicitly distinguish their racial identity while out in public as here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/chinese-americans-during-ww...
The fact of the matter is, being a visible ethnic minority come with challenges in addition to being just an ethnic minority. If you are visually similar to the ethnic target of the day, whether or not you actually have links with them, you automatically get hit as collateral damage whether you like it or not. German and Italian Americans could blend in and stay out of the spotlight during the world wars. Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian Americans could not and still cannot, and their visual appearance forces them to share the same spotlight. No matter how varied the Asian experience may be, the Pan-Asian identity will continue to exist because identity is not just a product what you think of yourself, but what others think of you and how they interact with you.
Agree: multiple visually similar ethnic minorities probably experience "spillover" racial hatred when any of them is does. Internment is a good example.
Disagree: German and Italian Americans experienced (and experience) ongoing racial prejudice. Cultural differences are very easy to spot and target for discrimination even when racial body features are not.
That situation is more complex than you imply. My German immigrant ancestors, for example, survived anti-German sentiment during and after the war by denying their heritage and giving up things like the communal making of barrels of sauerkraut, making Lumberger cheese, and of course most of all: speaking German. So they survived okay, but only with their culture completely assimilated.
The difference for visible ethnic minorities though is that even with your culture completely assimilated, you cannot hide your racial appearance and people will still treat you based on it. Plenty of Asian-Americans are 2+ generations in America little to no connection with their language and culture, completely assimilated as you say. They're still targeted just because of their appearance, assimilation does nothing to help protect them. For German and Italian Americans, at least assimilation has the intended effect.
I suspect there's probably some anger behind assimilating and tossing away cultural roots and identity only to find out it was absolutely pointless that's helping to drive the upsurge in recent Asian-American movements.
My German ancestor had a different experience. Perhaps he had to do this for a while after first arriving in Canada, but by the time I was born he was a part of a rich and thriving German community in the town I grew up in. I have many good memories of going to events at the German club growing up, singing German christmas carols in December, all of that stuff.
>As another non-Chinese Asian, really? You don’t want to be lumped in with the Chinese so it’s easier to know who the “bad ones” are?
> I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.
I don't condone hate crimes, and I don't hold any hostility to people of Chinese descent. But the CCP is a hostile nation, which in my opinion is engaging in liberal cyber warfare against western countries, committing genocide within its borders, and aggressively expanding its geopolitical influence across the globe. I think the CCP is evil. And yes, the United States government is full of bad actors as well, but I think the CCP is much worse and much more dystopian.
The converse of saying Muslims aren't accountable for the acts of Muslim extremists, is saying that supporters of Muslim extremists are accountable. Which really shouldn't be a controversial statement. You put "bad ones" in quotes to imply that there are no bad ones. I don't agree. A difficult conversation here is that while the majority of Muslims were not violent extremists, the majority of Chinese citizens are CCP supporters. It isn't a fringe belief, even among those living outside of China.
That doesn't justifying profiling someone based on appearance or committing a hate crime either way, but to put it bluntly, if someone says they support the CCP, I think they support a hostile enemy nation, on some spectrum of naivety/indifference to clarity/purpose, not unlike how I would respond to hearing someone is in the KKK. Most are probably just underinformed or misinformed, but its a dangerous state.
Forget brutish idiots who just hate squinty eyes. Yes, they're just assholes. Perception of China as an enemy nation is growing, and as a reactionary force, many people are calling this a racist movement because they want their Chinese friends and neighbors to feel comfortable in this country. I too have many Chinese friends. But your cultural heritage and ethnic origin are distinct from your government and geopolitical beliefs. It may require difficult conversations, and it may not lead to amicable outcomes, but I hope the national dialogue can sort out this nuance.
Chinese culture is awesome.
> It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now.
3 decades ago? Like in the 80s? I know Japan was seen as a rising economic power, but I don't think the perception was similar to that of China today, which is seen as a potential military threat among other things. I'm not especially well versed here though.
Politically, I am sympathetic to anyone would want to put as much distance
between themselves and the CCP, Chinese or not. It is hard to speak about the CCP without saying "the Chinese" and immediately sounding racist when the comment has nothing to do with race. That is the problem with overloaded terms.
Also, no one was saying things about Japan that they are saying about the CCP. There was great fear about the economic power of Japan. In terms of human rights and influence and military and pollution and human rights, the narrative was completely different.
> Politically, I am sympathetic to anyone would want to put as much distance between themselves and the CCP, Chinese or not.
Okay, but if how close I am to the CCP is seen as a function of how I look and where I’m from, then what the fuck am I supposed to do? Walk around in white-face with a big American flag and tell people I’m from Kansas?
The problem is that people are inferring political beliefs from how people look or their race or their nationality.
Regarding Japan, the narrative was different, but the sentiments were similar. Vincent Chin was murdered for being Japanese (although he was Chinese) and his murderers only got a $3000 fine.
And those assholes can fuck off. But are they really that numerous? Are they driving the cultural narrative? I think no, and in the areas where this is the case, I think it's probably more of a white vs. not white thing which is a whole other bag of worms.
This is an egregious strawman of gp’s comment. Gp plainly specified that they mean to distinguish between people of Chinese descent and CCP supporters. And there’s really no other way to play it if you oppose the CCP’s behavior and vision of international order.
The Japan example is ultimately a bad comparison. On the American side, it was much more transitory and contained narrative. On the counterparty side, the CCP is being much more openly hostile and normalizing atrocious, anachronistic state behavior.
Edit to add: Your closing attitude betrays a lot. If you are convinced in advance that American society writ large is determined to hate Asians, that is what you will contort your view to see. Further telling you ignored the data gp presented.
> Gp plainly specified that they mean to distinguish between people of Chinese descent and CCP supporters.
No, they plainly specified that they wanted to distinguish between other Asians and Chinese, and of the Chinese between CCP and non-CCP supporters. But in another comment they note that the majority of Chinese are CCP supporters anyway.
Let me ask, what do you think the end effect of this “racial distinguishing” is? What do we do once we’ve identified the “problematic ones”? How would such a system be implemented? Anyone could just claim to be non- Chinese/CCP supporters. Perhaps, a tattoo?
Obviously its by not assuming someone is a CCP supporter unless they voice this opinion. I did not say anything to the effect of harm or violence against people who support the CCP. But I think a stronger level of national comfort discussing the CCP as a hostile state would be beneficial.
My thesis is this: a growing population of Americans believe the CCP is hostile. A very small minority of Americans are violent and act on appearance alone. A band of thugs should not get to set the tone that America is becoming racist against Asians. The reality is that a nation state is growing in moral and geopolitical transgressions, and that is what people are upset about.
You don't need to profile anyone. But if someone says "I hate the CCP" and harasses a Korean person. That person is awful, but it doesn't make this a collective struggle.
The presence of racists does not define a cultural consensus that hatred of asians is growing. If there's a 100% in hate crimes against asians, and a 10000% person increase in negative feelings towards the CCP, I guarantee you, nobody will feel more hostile towards the CCP that non-CCP aligned asians.
Most Americans, and Europeans too, really don't know much about China. The picture you get painted by only reading news articles is not representative of what real life is actually like over there. China is not a third world country, and the CCP is not a North Korean style military dictatorship. It's really just a normal place, and visiting Shanghai or Hangzhou just feels like you're in US cities. You don't have to like the CCP to enjoy China and respect its people.
Visiting China’s richest cities (like Shanghai or Hangzhou) will also give one a biased view of what China is like, just less so than being completely uninformed. For the good and the bad, Beijing is much more representative, or head out to the countryside in the poorer provinces.
Ya, but I don't think a 5 star hotel in Zhizhun (where Microsoft Shanghai's office is located) is going to give you an idea of what real China is like.
Do you mean the Zizhu (紫竹) technology park? I used to live in the vicinity and took a lot of long walks, so I know there's quite a lot of agricultural land south and east of there. If you follow Dongchuan Road to the eastern end it already looks pretty rural, and randomly taking smaller roads from there in a southeasterly direction should lead you to your first rice field soon. That's less than 5 km away from the Microsoft campus.
However, I don't expect the kind of person who stays at a 5-star hotel to spend much time randomly exploring their surroundings.
Not my choice, that was during the expo anyways. Shanghai is one of the most boring places in China to visit, even if it has shiny modern city scapes. If you goto China and spend most of your time in shanghai? You’ll see much more of the real China in hefei, it’s only a night by train (and they probably have HSR now).
Or what about southern China during the winter? Learn what it’s like to live without central indoor heating is fun. I’ve never been colder in winter than in Changsha.
> You don't have to like the CCP to enjoy China and respect its people.
This is the crux of it though. You don't need to like the CCP to enjoy China and its people. But you don't need to dislike China and its people in order to consider the CCP a hostile, morally evil state.
I find it rather odd that you can describe yourself as "aggressively liberal" and then go on to defend discrimination against an entire ethnic group because of one government's admittedly problematic actions.
The CCP does not inherently represent Chinese people (either from the PRC or certainly ethnic Chinese broadly), any more than the Republican Party represented all Americans simply by virtue of being in control of Congress and the Presidency.
I find that a bad faith interpretation of the following quote:
> As a non-chinese, I'm also annoyed at the lack of differentiation between Asian and Chinese- and then further from Chinese descent vs. CCP supporter.
But to further exemplify. If objectively evil aliens who looked just like white dudes with early male balding appeared, and people started attacking bald people. I think bald people would be frustrated if the cultural narrative asserted on them was "Anti-bald hatred" and that all bald entities should work together here, including the evil aliens. The problem might just be that a subset of bald people are bad, and some assholes are particularly degenerate in their willingness to group them together. Bald people would reject being called the same as the evil aliens just because they're visually similar. They're not the problem and they shouldn't have to put up with this.
People hate the aliens, and a subset of people are just jerks. Unlike past controversies like anti Muslim and anti Black sentiments, anti-CCP isn't unsubstantiated. It's a non trivial threat. Some racist, violent thugs shouldn't get to control the cultural narrative of what's going on. If I oppose X, hell no am I going accept a movement that says that both I am equivalent to X, and that opposition to X is unfounded.
HMart has the most fresh produce and it’s prices are low because it’s not organic. I was trying to eat a lot of greens and found that most stores have “tourist greens” with small servings in big plastic tubs.
Even Whole Foods was hard to buy large amounts of spinach. Their green produce is mostly processed and wrapped in plastic and $5 for what’s $.75 per bunch at HMart.
i end up going too often to the large chain groceries for convenience, which contradicts my own principle of supporting small-/mid-sized businesses foremost (bad me). but ethnic groceries (plus trader joes) are slowly becoming more and more of my grocery pie, from korean places like h mart, to jons (hispanic/latino), mitsuwa (japanese), india sweets & spices, 99 ranch (chinese), bangkok market, and seafood city (filipino). i love the great array of ethnic, especially asian, groceries available in LA. it's wonderful!
Talking about plastic... I just ventured for the first time 2 weeks ago, in an H Mart. The first impression was "what a lot of plastic!".
The packaging is innovative, bright and smart. But that is a lot of packaging and plastic in general, sometimes for little product. We just ate last night one of their ramen, and beside the outer plastic wrapping, it had a styrofoam plate inside for which the only purpose was to hold two other internal plastic bags of noodles, and multiple plastic bags of sauce, all individually wrapped.
While the fresh products section was impressive and definitely a plus for me. All the other aisles were overwhelmingly full of individually wrapped in plastic products, from top to bottom. Hopefully we could do better here.
I have a visceral hatred of supermarkets. But H Mart is different. I actually like going there. It also seems like a kind of logistic miracle. How do they keep such a dizzying variety of stuff on the shelves, such a huge selection of fresh produce, meat, and fish?
>From the beginning, it was important to her that the stores were clean, modern and easy to navigate, to defy the stereotype of Asian groceries as grimy and run-down.
>To be welcoming to non-Koreans, H Mart puts up signs in English. At the same time, the younger Mr. Kwon said, “We don’t want to be the gentrified store.” So while some non-Asians recoil from the tanks of lobsters, the Kwons are committed to offering live seafood.
I grew up in Georgia and H Mart definitely changed the game with this strategy. They make it very accessible for someone who is unfamiliar with international grocery stores to come in and explore without feeling culturally intrusive. I speculate that H Mart and their food courts were the gateway drug to Korean food becoming a huge cuisine in Metro Atlanta as they were the first big brand in the game that I became aware of.
Edit: Also shout-out to Chai Pani, definitely hit that place up if you are ever in Decatur.
And also the Buford Hwy Farmers market which still manages to have an impressive array of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Caribbean, Mexican, Eastern European and even some Western European goods.
Meh, YDFM is a little bit more of a farmers market, but neither it nor BuHiFM are farmers markets they're both grocery stores and YDFM doesn't have anywhere near the international selections.
The real, actual farmers market is the Atlanta State Farmers market in Forest Park and it's one of the largest and most active in the US.
My guess is the 'Farmers Market' in the names is just marketing/branding to get shoppers to associate it with fresh produce, like Harry's Farmers Market before they turned into Whole Foods.
Some people brag about knowing which bodega to go to buy Mexican Coca-Cola but people who shop at BHFM know they can easily get Nigerian Coca-Cola and half a dozen other country's local variant. One of these days I'm going to take my friend's daughter who loves noodle bowls down there just to blow her mind on the aisle of noodle bowls.
What does that mean? When I'm overseas and I go to a "Western" supermarket that has western goods/brands that are very atypical to that in local supermarkets, the locals that shop there I am absolutely sure, don't feel they are being "culturally intrusive". The supermarket is there to SELL... They don't give a rats ass who comes in to make a purchase and I, as a western visitor, also did not see it as "cultural intrusion" when locals shop in these western supermarkets. The idea never entered my mind.
I like H Mart, by the way and I like the Japanese supers too.
If you go to an "old-school" Asian grocer, the shelves are packed to the rafters, there's essentially no signage in English, and you can't help but feel like you're getting in the way of the regulars. This feels much less welcoming, while an H Mart style place that's laid out and brightly lit like a "regular" supermarket is much more conducive to exploration.
I don't know. You're just another shopper to them. The shopkeeper wants turnover, no matter who you are. Sure, they will look out for shoplifters more than regular supermarkets because their margins are even thinner, but if you become recognizable (patronizing semi regularly) no one will care. They may at first have some slight trepidation about returns (you buying something not knowing what it is), but if you become even semi regular, you're just another shopper.
I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.
I'm not saying the grocer doesn't want you there -- I'm saying you feel like you're literally in the way (as in, physically blocking the aisle) if you stand around the snack aisle scratching your head, while the regulars are making a beeline for the fish sauce and packs of mala tofu skin.
> I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.
Respectfully, you may be overthinking it. If you take it at face value, this is simply a business designing their retail experience with new customers in mind.
This isn't a "political correctness" thing. People new to serious comic book stores, stone and gravel retailers, etc. can easily feel overwhelmed and a bit lost in the same way.
I don’t like the phrase either, but I wonder if it wasn’t meant to be more benign.. as in, you go to a grocery store catering to locals of another culture, and you walk up and down the aisle, you don’t understand any of the packaging, and you can get the sense that if you laugh or have a “thats weird food” reaction to any of it, that’d be rude, so you hold it in.
I grew up as the child of east European immigrants, and growing up we’d always had our own stores to buy food from the homeland. They’re gone, for the most part, but I can walk into most Russian grocery stores and get what I want, but I don’t understand most of the Russian options. Asking about some of the foods can lead to a strained or confusing conversation.
They're not talking being judged by the employees. They're talking being judged by the other shoppers.
Imagine being a foreign tourist to America, going into a middle-American Wal-Mart — one far away from places where any tourists would ever bother to visit. Some American dudebro wandering through the aisle asks you a question (in English), and then gets pissed off when they realize that you don't speak English, and starts berating you and wondering out loud what his town is coming to.
The social-anxiety expectation for the experience of shopping in a small neighbourhood ethnic grocery store, is the projected reverse of that: the shoppers there seeing you there bumbling about,
unable to pronounce any of the names of the items, and responding by wondering angrily in $language what their district-of-the-town is coming to, i.e. when their nice little ethnic enclave community got so gentrified/whitewashed that "people like that" started showing up.
(Despite being white, it's the racist American dudebro part of this that I've experienced before, second-hand, while taking my (non-white) partner on a trip to show them a more-rural area I used to live in. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.)
“ you can't help but feel like you're getting in the way of the regulars.”
I usually get treated as a funny curiosity in Thai and Indian stores. The feeling of being intrusive or in the way is self imposed. I don’t get annoyed at Asian people in Western stores either.
It surprises me how lenient the US is about American business not providing English signage. Wouldn’t this be considered a form of discrimination? I’m sure that if a German grocery store were to open in Paris with only German signage there would be an outrage.
The long hand of the market takes care of this. If you want to hire only people that speak French and hang up only signage in French in a city with 99.9% English speakers, there are dozens of middle men with their hand out eager to help you get set up. Staying open is your business not theirs.
Food labels, especially nutritional data and the list of ingredients must have at least an English translation. So even if the signage doesn't have to be in English, you can look at the nutrition label on the back for some clue.
Some local jurisdictions do require translations on signs. The City of Doraville in metro Atlanta has a high Asian population and stores are required to have an English translation for their signs.
There are still places like that in SF's Chinatown. There's enough customer density to support a walk-in market that doesn't use shopping carts. SF's Chinatown has twice the population density of SF. And a median age of 47, almost 10 years higher than the rest of SF. So there are still old-school Asian grocery stores.
Nijya Market has a number of good Japanese grocery stores in the SF bay area. They're rather expensive, like Whole Foods. Noted for fresh fish and sushi. Also, they have the good Pocky, from Japan, not the made-in-Thailand stuff. Their stores are small supermarkets, with carts and parking.
SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. Where are the black-glass buildings, the fast forward fashion from Beijing, the automated stores, and the latest parts from Shenzhen? They're in Cupertino, home of Apple, which is 67% Asian and has entire malls of good Asian stores. The big mall across the street from the Apple mothership is a good place to start.
I prefer the 1950s style, the produce isn't wrapped to death in plastic. My general rule is that the more plastic it has, the further away it was produced. The small Asian places have their own farm pipeline for the specialty vegetables, not industrial scale farms like from a Safeway. I cannot resist the allure of Nijiya, though, as they will have veggies and fruits that nobody else has.
> The supermarket is there to SELL... They don't give a rats ass ...
Which supermarket are you talking about? And how do you know what they think? I think we are applying economic theory, in which there arguably shouldn't be prejudice, to reality, where there is lots of prejudice:
Businesses have a long history of giving rats asses and much more about who their clientele is, demographically, ethnically, racially, socially, etc., and IME and in many public examples, many still do. I've seen discrimination, subtle and overt, against people who are young, old, rich, poor, black, brown, fashionable or not, speaking a different language, etc. etc. etc.
Those that have been to a chinese grocery store in California know they sell all sorts of exotic delights that could cause a newcomer laugh, point, or say "ew" aloud.
I’m sure if this person feels that just walking in is “culturally intrusive”, then, if they walked in they’d behave like an adult and that would be beside the point?
Was H-mart around before the Buford Highway Farmers market? I went there for years before I ever saw an H-Mart and it was very inviting, but maybe H-mart was around and I just didn't know it.
Also to add, growing up in Georgia I feel like every grocery store I went in had a tank of live lobsters. Even Red lobster had that, so I don't see why they think non-asian's would recoil from that.
Yeah I didn't understand that part, specifically with lobsters because every grocery store has lobsters in my experience. I think Buford has been around longer but H Mart made it into the suburbs/ OTP area.
Thumbs up for Chai Pani, I was really sad when they discontinued their packaged/frozen food for home a few months ago, was great to have their curries in the freezer and ready to go in the same amount of time it took to cook some rice.
I'm very fond of H-Mart. I've been grocery shopping at H-Mart stores since I've been within driving distance of them. The produce is fresh, affordable, and diverse. The stores are very well managed. Of all the stores I've gone to since the pandemic, H-Mart has managed crowds and public health the best. They've been very responsible.
Maangchi teaches traditional recipes in a clear and concise fashion. One of my favorite recipes is Jjolmyeon, which is a chewy noodle with spicy sauce that is loaded with vegetables.
ha, i think that's a weird cultural quirk with asian groceries in general. you're expected to know what you want, acquire it efficiently, and then get out quickly. that's in contrast to other types of asian stores, where the salesfolk follow you around and talk up everything you touch as if it were the smartest choice you could have possibly made (go you!).
I love their customer service. Not once have I have I been asked how I'm doing at check out. I guess some people expect it but I find the obligation to have small talk annoying.
I’ve been to multiple H Marts, mostly in or near urban areas (NYC). I absolutely HATE going to H Mart because it’s always crowded, and the aisles are too narrow to have someone navigate through if there is another person in that same aisle. Is this the norm for H Marts elsewhere?
For a somewhat contrarian view, most Americans who shop at these places may claim to want authenticity and variety, but probably ignore the authenticity and variety of what local farmers grow. How many buy radishes, turnips, and cabbage from nearby farms, let alone stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, or less common plants that grow nearby (I'm writing in New York City, not sure what grows near you)? The U.S. used to grow thousands of varieties of cabbage. Most Americans probably eat two or three a year.
Most of the products the article describes, though not all, are ultraprocessed and packaged for indefinite shelf life and global shipping.
I'm all for variety and experiencing other cultures, so nothing against these stores, but I hope people look nearby to find healthy, affordable, local basic foods too. Their farmers, environment, and taste buds will thank them.
This article is intriguing to me, because I live near an H Mart... had never been in it, and had no idea what it was. I assumed it was just like... a generic off brand grocery store.
I buy all my produce and a lot of meat at asian grocery stores. Way better selection of greens, cuts of meat, etc, and tends to be cheaper especially for produce.
Yeah love that you mentioned T&T. It’s more Chinese rather than Korean focused though. I think they really cleaned things up when Loblaws bought them. They’ve got some really nice stores (clean, spacious and well-lit) in Markham.
So there's some interesting history on the founding of H Mart that doesn't exist in English. The founder of H Mart is the child of a former secretary of former president Chun Doo-hwan, who is believed to have laundered a bunch of money from the Korean government. It's widely believed that some of the money was used to start H Mart, and my Korean wife is cautious about patronizing it because of that.
I wish I could provide English sources, but they only exist in Korean.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadThis article prompted me to discover that there are also several H Marts within NYC!
This article puts a large emphasis on race relations but honestly I think the anti-asian voice is very small. Certainly an order of magnitude smaller than what arabs a decade prior. Casually looking up stats on the FBI hate crime database (2019 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table...), asian hate crimes are an order magnitude less than black/african american hate crimes. I've seen stats suggestings a 100%+ increase in rates for asian americans in the past year, but that still puts it at a relatively lower number than other groups.
Idk. As an aggressively liberal asian american living in a heavily blue area full of BLM and other progressive movements, this one doesn't resonate with me as the cultural emergency it's being shaped as. This could be local bias, but I don't believe the sentiment towards asians for the median, or even 90th percentile individual has changed that much. I don't know if I believe the local experience of the median asian has changed all that much either.
As a non-chinese, I'm also annoyed at the lack of differentiation between Asian and Chinese- and then further from Chinese descent vs. CCP supporter. If there is any growing anti asian sentiment, it's almost entirely due to the actions of the CCP. If trends continue in this direction, I foresee a push to stop using the term Asian. Many (most?) Asian cultures consider the CCP to be a hostile nation and likely won't tolerate being lumped in with them.
I'm also pretty liberal, but it feels like the NYT has decided it's their role to litigate the culture war. I really don't love it. Being driven to substack a la Taibbi and Greenwald, because it's not like going and reading Breitbart or whatever is going to give me better info.
I don’t agree with their political beliefs, but I find Taibbi and Greenwald readable. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is exactly, but you can tell they have far more intellectual respect for their readers than the mainstream propagandists do.
[1] Think Chesterton’s Fence applied to politics.
I like this. I may have to adapt this somehow. “Where do you stand on....” “I’m on the fence—the Chesterton fence.”
The fact that it does for some chinese-americans and other asians.... I'm not sure exactly what it says but there is something there and I don't think it's benign.
If someone says anti-asian ideals are on the rise, I think it's important to unpack that to say it is caused primarily by the ccp. Many people are anti-ccp but not anti-asian, likely including, a majority of non-chinese southeast asians. Having that conversation is how you remove vague racist sentiments and encourage a focus on actual political entities.
Yes, people often fail and just use visual cues. But historically there have been differences. E.g. the original american views on japan were that of a refined civilization and sort of honorary white Asian vs. the chinese, which is all sorts of fucked up, but serves to highlight that even dumbass racially driven views can have nuance.
Assuming you're a liberal American, how do you feel about conservative media saying the country needs to be protected from anti-american sentiment in europe for trump being an idiot some time ago? Is it possible you thought "Actually I dislike trump too, he's not my president, and I shouldn't be held accountable for him?" Do you accept generalizations about Americans using subsets that you find abhorrent? Have you never said "there's large differences between the red and blue states, it's not all like that"?
I certainly said things like that a lot, and at the end of the day, I think the crimes against humanity being committed by the CCP are worse than those of trump.
African as a label becomes even stranger when mixed with American. African-American is usually used as a synonym for Black American, despite not all Africans being Black. An Egyptian-American likely would not be called African-American.
We use words weirdly!
My girlfriend's mom is Cambodian with Chinese ancestry. One time she was describing a pickled cabbage preparation from her home village, and I responded with "oh, so kind of like Korean kimchi?" and her response was "yeah, but Asian-style."
In her mind, "Asia" specifically means China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Thailand.
Hierarchy I don't believe is the right term. The homogeniety of norms is what matter. White women have surely encountered microaggressions. Non-normative white men as well. Honestly everybody differs from the norm in some way. The magnitude and frequency are what make it matter.
Someone thinking your last name implies kinship is whatever. Someone thinking you're a secretary because you're a black woman when you're the CEO is a big big problem.
Isn't that expected because there's an order of magnitude less asians? Not to mention that the people targeted with this wave of violence are probably east asians which are a subset of all asians.
Per the article, Asian-Americans are 7% of this country. I leave as an exercise what an order-of-magnitude would imply here.
edit: that is, adding one violent white nationalist will increase anti asian violence far more than adding one asian person.
I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.
It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now. The people who want to hate Asians will find a reason.
The fact of the matter is, being a visible ethnic minority come with challenges in addition to being just an ethnic minority. If you are visually similar to the ethnic target of the day, whether or not you actually have links with them, you automatically get hit as collateral damage whether you like it or not. German and Italian Americans could blend in and stay out of the spotlight during the world wars. Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian Americans could not and still cannot, and their visual appearance forces them to share the same spotlight. No matter how varied the Asian experience may be, the Pan-Asian identity will continue to exist because identity is not just a product what you think of yourself, but what others think of you and how they interact with you.
Disagree: German and Italian Americans experienced (and experience) ongoing racial prejudice. Cultural differences are very easy to spot and target for discrimination even when racial body features are not.
I suspect there's probably some anger behind assimilating and tossing away cultural roots and identity only to find out it was absolutely pointless that's helping to drive the upsurge in recent Asian-American movements.
I guess it depends on the region.
> I hate this rhetoric. Whenever a hate crime occurs, it’s so common to hear “they didn’t deserve that, they’re not even Chinese!”. As though being Chinese would make it ok.
I don't condone hate crimes, and I don't hold any hostility to people of Chinese descent. But the CCP is a hostile nation, which in my opinion is engaging in liberal cyber warfare against western countries, committing genocide within its borders, and aggressively expanding its geopolitical influence across the globe. I think the CCP is evil. And yes, the United States government is full of bad actors as well, but I think the CCP is much worse and much more dystopian.
The converse of saying Muslims aren't accountable for the acts of Muslim extremists, is saying that supporters of Muslim extremists are accountable. Which really shouldn't be a controversial statement. You put "bad ones" in quotes to imply that there are no bad ones. I don't agree. A difficult conversation here is that while the majority of Muslims were not violent extremists, the majority of Chinese citizens are CCP supporters. It isn't a fringe belief, even among those living outside of China.
That doesn't justifying profiling someone based on appearance or committing a hate crime either way, but to put it bluntly, if someone says they support the CCP, I think they support a hostile enemy nation, on some spectrum of naivety/indifference to clarity/purpose, not unlike how I would respond to hearing someone is in the KKK. Most are probably just underinformed or misinformed, but its a dangerous state.
Forget brutish idiots who just hate squinty eyes. Yes, they're just assholes. Perception of China as an enemy nation is growing, and as a reactionary force, many people are calling this a racist movement because they want their Chinese friends and neighbors to feel comfortable in this country. I too have many Chinese friends. But your cultural heritage and ethnic origin are distinct from your government and geopolitical beliefs. It may require difficult conversations, and it may not lead to amicable outcomes, but I hope the national dialogue can sort out this nuance.
Chinese culture is awesome.
> It’s easy to forget that 3 decades ago, people were saying the same thing about Japan as they’re saying about China now.
3 decades ago? Like in the 80s? I know Japan was seen as a rising economic power, but I don't think the perception was similar to that of China today, which is seen as a potential military threat among other things. I'm not especially well versed here though.
Politically, I am sympathetic to anyone would want to put as much distance between themselves and the CCP, Chinese or not. It is hard to speak about the CCP without saying "the Chinese" and immediately sounding racist when the comment has nothing to do with race. That is the problem with overloaded terms.
Also, no one was saying things about Japan that they are saying about the CCP. There was great fear about the economic power of Japan. In terms of human rights and influence and military and pollution and human rights, the narrative was completely different.
Okay, but if how close I am to the CCP is seen as a function of how I look and where I’m from, then what the fuck am I supposed to do? Walk around in white-face with a big American flag and tell people I’m from Kansas?
The problem is that people are inferring political beliefs from how people look or their race or their nationality.
Regarding Japan, the narrative was different, but the sentiments were similar. Vincent Chin was murdered for being Japanese (although he was Chinese) and his murderers only got a $3000 fine.
The Japan example is ultimately a bad comparison. On the American side, it was much more transitory and contained narrative. On the counterparty side, the CCP is being much more openly hostile and normalizing atrocious, anachronistic state behavior.
Edit to add: Your closing attitude betrays a lot. If you are convinced in advance that American society writ large is determined to hate Asians, that is what you will contort your view to see. Further telling you ignored the data gp presented.
No, they plainly specified that they wanted to distinguish between other Asians and Chinese, and of the Chinese between CCP and non-CCP supporters. But in another comment they note that the majority of Chinese are CCP supporters anyway.
Let me ask, what do you think the end effect of this “racial distinguishing” is? What do we do once we’ve identified the “problematic ones”? How would such a system be implemented? Anyone could just claim to be non- Chinese/CCP supporters. Perhaps, a tattoo?
My thesis is this: a growing population of Americans believe the CCP is hostile. A very small minority of Americans are violent and act on appearance alone. A band of thugs should not get to set the tone that America is becoming racist against Asians. The reality is that a nation state is growing in moral and geopolitical transgressions, and that is what people are upset about.
You don't need to profile anyone. But if someone says "I hate the CCP" and harasses a Korean person. That person is awful, but it doesn't make this a collective struggle.
The presence of racists does not define a cultural consensus that hatred of asians is growing. If there's a 100% in hate crimes against asians, and a 10000% person increase in negative feelings towards the CCP, I guarantee you, nobody will feel more hostile towards the CCP that non-CCP aligned asians.
However, I don't expect the kind of person who stays at a 5-star hotel to spend much time randomly exploring their surroundings.
Or what about southern China during the winter? Learn what it’s like to live without central indoor heating is fun. I’ve never been colder in winter than in Changsha.
This is the crux of it though. You don't need to like the CCP to enjoy China and its people. But you don't need to dislike China and its people in order to consider the CCP a hostile, morally evil state.
Rebranding the latter as racism is damaging.
The CCP does not inherently represent Chinese people (either from the PRC or certainly ethnic Chinese broadly), any more than the Republican Party represented all Americans simply by virtue of being in control of Congress and the Presidency.
> As a non-chinese, I'm also annoyed at the lack of differentiation between Asian and Chinese- and then further from Chinese descent vs. CCP supporter.
But to further exemplify. If objectively evil aliens who looked just like white dudes with early male balding appeared, and people started attacking bald people. I think bald people would be frustrated if the cultural narrative asserted on them was "Anti-bald hatred" and that all bald entities should work together here, including the evil aliens. The problem might just be that a subset of bald people are bad, and some assholes are particularly degenerate in their willingness to group them together. Bald people would reject being called the same as the evil aliens just because they're visually similar. They're not the problem and they shouldn't have to put up with this.
People hate the aliens, and a subset of people are just jerks. Unlike past controversies like anti Muslim and anti Black sentiments, anti-CCP isn't unsubstantiated. It's a non trivial threat. Some racist, violent thugs shouldn't get to control the cultural narrative of what's going on. If I oppose X, hell no am I going accept a movement that says that both I am equivalent to X, and that opposition to X is unfounded.
Even Whole Foods was hard to buy large amounts of spinach. Their green produce is mostly processed and wrapped in plastic and $5 for what’s $.75 per bunch at HMart.
The packaging is innovative, bright and smart. But that is a lot of packaging and plastic in general, sometimes for little product. We just ate last night one of their ramen, and beside the outer plastic wrapping, it had a styrofoam plate inside for which the only purpose was to hold two other internal plastic bags of noodles, and multiple plastic bags of sauce, all individually wrapped.
While the fresh products section was impressive and definitely a plus for me. All the other aisles were overwhelmingly full of individually wrapped in plastic products, from top to bottom. Hopefully we could do better here.
>To be welcoming to non-Koreans, H Mart puts up signs in English. At the same time, the younger Mr. Kwon said, “We don’t want to be the gentrified store.” So while some non-Asians recoil from the tanks of lobsters, the Kwons are committed to offering live seafood.
I grew up in Georgia and H Mart definitely changed the game with this strategy. They make it very accessible for someone who is unfamiliar with international grocery stores to come in and explore without feeling culturally intrusive. I speculate that H Mart and their food courts were the gateway drug to Korean food becoming a huge cuisine in Metro Atlanta as they were the first big brand in the game that I became aware of.
Edit: Also shout-out to Chai Pani, definitely hit that place up if you are ever in Decatur.
The real, actual farmers market is the Atlanta State Farmers market in Forest Park and it's one of the largest and most active in the US.
I've been to LA, NY, Boston, SF and haven't seen anything closely like it. H Mart's probably the closest thing and it doesn't compare in any way
What does that mean? When I'm overseas and I go to a "Western" supermarket that has western goods/brands that are very atypical to that in local supermarkets, the locals that shop there I am absolutely sure, don't feel they are being "culturally intrusive". The supermarket is there to SELL... They don't give a rats ass who comes in to make a purchase and I, as a western visitor, also did not see it as "cultural intrusion" when locals shop in these western supermarkets. The idea never entered my mind.
I like H Mart, by the way and I like the Japanese supers too.
I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.
Respectfully, you may be overthinking it. If you take it at face value, this is simply a business designing their retail experience with new customers in mind.
This isn't a "political correctness" thing. People new to serious comic book stores, stone and gravel retailers, etc. can easily feel overwhelmed and a bit lost in the same way.
Ok I can feel cramped. Where or how does cultural intrusion enter the picture?
Is that like trying to sit with the jocks at the lunch table in high school and they look at you weird like you’re intruding their culture?
I grew up as the child of east European immigrants, and growing up we’d always had our own stores to buy food from the homeland. They’re gone, for the most part, but I can walk into most Russian grocery stores and get what I want, but I don’t understand most of the Russian options. Asking about some of the foods can lead to a strained or confusing conversation.
They don't look at you weird. You just feel it.
My analogy would be wearing shoes inside a house when they typically don't wear.
Imagine being a foreign tourist to America, going into a middle-American Wal-Mart — one far away from places where any tourists would ever bother to visit. Some American dudebro wandering through the aisle asks you a question (in English), and then gets pissed off when they realize that you don't speak English, and starts berating you and wondering out loud what his town is coming to.
The social-anxiety expectation for the experience of shopping in a small neighbourhood ethnic grocery store, is the projected reverse of that: the shoppers there seeing you there bumbling about, unable to pronounce any of the names of the items, and responding by wondering angrily in $language what their district-of-the-town is coming to, i.e. when their nice little ethnic enclave community got so gentrified/whitewashed that "people like that" started showing up.
(Despite being white, it's the racist American dudebro part of this that I've experienced before, second-hand, while taking my (non-white) partner on a trip to show them a more-rural area I used to live in. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.)
I usually get treated as a funny curiosity in Thai and Indian stores. The feeling of being intrusive or in the way is self imposed. I don’t get annoyed at Asian people in Western stores either.
Why would they? English doesn't have a legally protected status.
Some local jurisdictions do require translations on signs. The City of Doraville in metro Atlanta has a high Asian population and stores are required to have an English translation for their signs.
Nijya Market has a number of good Japanese grocery stores in the SF bay area. They're rather expensive, like Whole Foods. Noted for fresh fish and sushi. Also, they have the good Pocky, from Japan, not the made-in-Thailand stuff. Their stores are small supermarkets, with carts and parking.
SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. Where are the black-glass buildings, the fast forward fashion from Beijing, the automated stores, and the latest parts from Shenzhen? They're in Cupertino, home of Apple, which is 67% Asian and has entire malls of good Asian stores. The big mall across the street from the Apple mothership is a good place to start.
Which supermarket are you talking about? And how do you know what they think? I think we are applying economic theory, in which there arguably shouldn't be prejudice, to reality, where there is lots of prejudice:
Businesses have a long history of giving rats asses and much more about who their clientele is, demographically, ethnically, racially, socially, etc., and IME and in many public examples, many still do. I've seen discrimination, subtle and overt, against people who are young, old, rich, poor, black, brown, fashionable or not, speaking a different language, etc. etc. etc.
Humans are individuals with their own thoughts. Attributing thinking to a large mass of people doesn't make sense, in my way of thinking.
I’m sure if this person feels that just walking in is “culturally intrusive”, then, if they walked in they’d behave like an adult and that would be beside the point?
Also to add, growing up in Georgia I feel like every grocery store I went in had a tank of live lobsters. Even Red lobster had that, so I don't see why they think non-asian's would recoil from that.
If you're interested in Korean cooking, I recommend watching Maangchi's youtube channel cooking show: https://www.youtube.com/user/Maangchi
Maangchi teaches traditional recipes in a clear and concise fashion. One of my favorite recipes is Jjolmyeon, which is a chewy noodle with spicy sauce that is loaded with vegetables.
Hate HMart for the customer service. Forget about getting help with anything while in there.
I routinely experience unhelpful, uncaring employees that make shopping at HMart completely frustrating.
Most of the products the article describes, though not all, are ultraprocessed and packaged for indefinite shelf life and global shipping.
I'm all for variety and experiencing other cultures, so nothing against these stores, but I hope people look nearby to find healthy, affordable, local basic foods too. Their farmers, environment, and taste buds will thank them.
I learned something new today!
Though I'm in Atlanta and Buford Highway Farmer's Market is still superior...
I wish I could provide English sources, but they only exist in Korean.
https://www.bostonkorea.com/news.php?code=en&mode=view&num=1...