It’s springtime in New York City’s Chinatown, and bright red tomatoes are stacked on a table outside Gary Liang’s store, just $2.99 a pound. A florist by trade, Liang started selling fresh vegetables during the pandemic to keep his business, G&J Florist, afloat, connecting directly with farmers in Pennsylvania and Maryland to create his own personal supply chain, including Swiss chard, Japanese sweet potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes.
Just 80 years after the law was finally repealed, family-run food markets in Asian communities from coast to coast still offer high-quality produce, meat, eggs and fish at bargain prices, often using the same direct connections to farmers and fishermen established by earlier generations.
Unsurprisingly, the post went viral. “I literally wrote it while I was sitting in the delivery truck,” Jefferson says. “I’d seen supermarkets charging $59.99 a pound for drumsticks. At first I thought, ‘Fine, I should do that,’ but then I thought about families like mine and the aunts and grandmas of people I grew up with. I didn’t want to be a scumbag.”
“The recipes that Asians use are different,” says Lee’s daughter Anita, 45, who joined the family business in 2001. “The chickens are older and the cooking methods are usually poaching or steaming instead of roasting, with ginger and green onion in the water. The meat needs to be more dense and flavorful.” Because Chinese immigrant communities tend to cook a lot, she says, it allows Bo Bo to keep prices competitive, even for a specialty product.
For activist Jan Lee, a third-generation resident of New York’s Chinatown whose own father drove produce north from Florida in the 1940s when White truckers strictly controlled trucking routes, there’s a deep concern that shopping for affordable fresh food in America’s Asian communities is under threat from gentrification, as real estate developers buy up cheap buildings.