One of the monuments, you can almost say, in my town is this Chinese grocery store located at the edge of downtown. There are other Chinese grocery stores, though not many, but none is as big, successful, or popular as this one. It is popular not only with the Chinese community here, which comprises mostly scholars and their families studying or visiting the university. This grocery store is in nearly every way like a Chinatown grocery store. The staff is never generous with smiles before customers, their English is heavy with accent but nearly absent in courtesy. I was taken aback once when the lady that seems always at the register every day said "Thank you" to me. She now just has to learn the words "Please" and "You are welcome." Like a Chinatown, this store is almost a transplant from the old times in Hong Kong, and no wonder, it's called "Hong Kong Grocery", but the people that run it are not from Hong Kong. I don't understand the dialect they use but I assume it's Fukinese, the latest wave of poor immigrants. They are very different from the Chinese scholars here, who are very educated, obviously, and mostly from the northern part of the country. Furthermore, the people who work here are very much business-oriented and no nonsense. Their attitudes in business is super efficiency and you can see that in the way their food and goods are presented in the store.
Before you walk in, as you stand in front of the door, you will see a big sign that says they don't take credit cards unless the purchase is more than $25. That is an improvement from a few years ago when they didn't take plastic at all. But still, $25 limit? I almost burst out laughing when I saw that the first time. Then when you walk in, standing only at the threshold, you are greeted by a strong smell that you probably have never encountered before unless you have been to a Chinese grocery store in Chinatown. It's not very clear what the source of the smell is, but it is obviously a concoction of all the interesting items you will find inside.
Did I tell you they aren't big on being courteous? So you wouldn't get a "Welcome", not even a look at you for acknowledgment. Mind you, in China, there is always some pretty and young lady at the door greeting you. Here the smell and, if in the winter, the chill inside would greet you. Yes, they turn down the heat in the store during winter, just as there is no AC in the summer. Cost-cutting. You're here not for a shopping experience, but rather, to buy food.
Admittedly, they have the biggest store of Chinese and Asian goods you can find in town. The basement is where you would find things that could rot, like fish, for which a lot of people come to this store, and vegetables. But then again, any further attempt to categorize the basement fails. There are lots of other things down there. When you first descend, the smell turns rancid, especially in the summer. Even though there's a lot of fish and seafood downstairs, there is no AC. The poor carcasses depend entirely on the bath of meager ice they are sitting in. I wonder if more than one person has gotten food poisoning from their goods. Nothing here looks fresh and yet it manages to be the place for seafood in town. On the days that the seafood comes in, you see lines of people, mostly African-Americans, for some reason, waiting to get their fresh fish. The interaction between the non-Chinese customers and the Chinese workers is quite tense and comical at the same time. The former refuses to speak slower and enunciate, while the latter doesn't really care to understand. They just point and get frustrated until the right fish of the right amount and of the right cut is determined.
By the vegetables you find this old man sometimes, taking vegetables out of huge boxes and tying them up into smaller sizes for sale. Well, "small" is a relative term because to maximize margin, they really tighten up the vegetables so that while they don't look huge, they weigh a lot. The old man often is seen working with at least one Hispanic man, sometimes two. They would chat, but if you're not careful, you can't really understand either one's words because they are cloaked in heavy accents. The vegetables are well-known to all Chinese who regularly cook Chinese food, here as well as back home in China. But they made, at some point, an attempt t label the vegetables and even put a price on it. But that was a long time ago. Now the vegetables are not what the label below them say, and I wonder about the price.
Besides these perishable items, downstairs you will find, oddly, a key cutting machine. A couple of years ago they decided to get into the key cutting business, very cheap, as usual. I guess the Chinese here have no clue where to get their keys cut when they settle in their first American apartment (usually smells very odd too, but in a different way). Like the key cutting business, they used to have a hair cutting business on the second floor when they were at the old location (which was next door). Now that hair cutting room has branched off into a "salon" next door (not the same next door). Chinese people, even the scholars, aren't comfortable with the language, and along with other reasons, don't feel like interacting with the "Americans" (or as they call them, "foreigners"), and so there is a demand, always, in any Chinese community, formal or informal, for basic services like cutting hair and keys, and, of course, grocery shopping. For this reason, downstairs there are other bizarre items, such as dish washing detergents, laundry detergents, cookware, kitchen utensils, and why not throw in some ceramic stuff, some of which I don't really know. And in the back corner, there is a mysterious door that goes to, surely, an even more bizarre wonder world forbidden to the clients of this interesting enclave.
Back upstairs, you find the rest of the needs of the Asian community. There's a huge heap of bags and bags of rice, bigger than what you can find at Costco. (Costco, by the way, is a very popular destination for the Chinese community, who, whether business-oriented or not, mostly is interested in saving money at all cost.) There's a variety of rice, as you can imagine that since it is such an integral part of Asia, there are many kinds and many uses. The rice piles are on your left as you enter and recover from the strange smell. Right in front of you is a pile of seasonal things. "Seasonal" only in a relative term. It's for whatever holiday is about to happen or has happened. In the latter case, it's discounted at amounts proportional to how far past that holiday has gone. But now they are preparing for Chinese new year, and they have all sorts of sweets and other preparatory stuff for that major holiday. But rest assure that these items won't be thrown away for a while after Chinese New Year starts. It will remain a new year for as long as there is left-over inventory for that holiday.
Then behind this are the aisles and aisles of food and condiments and other perishables. To make sure you are perplexed enough, no aisle is marked so you really have no idea the first or second time what's in the aisles. And if you are here just because you found a neat Asian recipe that calls for something you won't find in any other kinds of stores, you are going to be a little lost. Sometimes, they would know the word in English and direct you to the right place. But often times the staff have no idea what you are talking about.
Things have gotten better over the years. Now they actually know what fish sauce is, which is different from fish oil. But something exotic like four-spice condiment, you get mostly a blank stare, or better, a frustrated and annoyed one. The best thing is to go through every item in the aisles by first giving yourself some time. You might think it's a sauce and wouldn't be near where the noodles are, and there are lots of noodles, but you could be dead wrong as they often stock things based on minimizing space needed. The more non-perishables you can stock, the more you can sell at fixed stocking cost!
They also attempt to sell non-Asian things like baking soda and baking powder, probably for the few Chinese who might actually be interested in baking Western sweets. And they are of brands you never have heard of or will. Where they get these cheap brands is something Walmart should try to figure out.
Next to the cash register are the fruits, piles and piles of fruits always standing at the threshold of rotting. Do people buy this stuff? At least they sell it. I have never seen a green banana, but only rarely do I see a yellow one; most of the time it's brown-dot heaven. There are also, with the fruits, packaged drinks, again, Asian ones, like sweetened soymilk, cane juice, juice of aloe vera that supposedly has zero sugar added but it tastes like syrup. And added to this potpourri is Asianized Western baking, like lemon rolls, sweet buns, and other sweets that you have to think a bit before you can recognize its Western style.
So you've found what you were looking for, and discarded most of it because they seemed quite rotten. Whatever you have left, you bring to the register to the never-smiling men and women behind the counter. And you wait for your turn, which comes quickly because in lacking courtesy and joy these people make up with speed and efficiency, something Stop and Shop workers could learn. And as you wait you look up and behind the smile-less robots is more potpourri of weirdness. There's the usual cigarettes that are beyond arm's length for minors, though I doubt they check IDs here. There are boxes on the very top that at first confuse you because you don't know what they are. One has an Arctic wolf howling on it. What could that be? On its left is one with a drawing of a sensuous woman in old dynastic era clothing. Getting closer. (Of course, if you know how to read Chinese you would have figured it out by now.) But then on the right of the wolf you see a big black box with drawing of a bronze man, ridiculously muscular, completely naked, humping a slender bronze woman, equally naked, but screaming, and you can see everything, and I mean, everything! And on the box, finally, some English, sort of, "Stree[t] King". Not sure what that really means, and asking a Chinese person with the Chinese written on it doesn't help since it still means Street King. But now you have a better idea what the top portion is about. Look further down you see the expected different kinds of condom. And then there's the advil and other painkillers at the end of the shelf.
So you pay, with cash, of course, and you grab your few non-rotten things now in a plastic bag, and you end your tour of this odd place that's been around for at least ten years (it used to say on the awning what year it started). A lot of non-Chinese people know about this place, even if they don't go in there. Despite all the strangeness, there's something to be said about an institution that's survived this long, and more than survived, it was so prosperous that it was able to move into the current, bigger space from next door, and the old place it was able to afford converting to a restaurant. They didn't bother with the names, both the grocery store an the newly renovated restaurant are called Hong Kong Grocery, and restaurant is doing very well. There's another Chinese institution in town, the old Chinese restaurant with its, yes, cheap food for the students and its own, yes, distinct smell. But this new restaurant opened by an old grocery store is doing very well, lots of interesting food, including dimsum and even Mongolian hotpot. Just today, I saw that they added a piano inside! I have never seen a piano in a Chinese restaurant. Whatever for? But rest assure that it was done with meticulous business planning and I can't wait to see how the piano pans out.
