The Lure of H Mart, Where the Shelves Can Seem as Wide as Asia
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
This article prompted me to discover that there are also several H Marts within NYC!
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.
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.
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.