On a soft afternoon last month, Amy Tran sparked a delivery to the Yue Wa market, a small grocery store and a plant-based plant shop in the Chinese district of Los Angeles which it opened 17 years ago.
The whole contained two dozen units of Shou Wu Chih, a concoction made from Chinese plants known to rebuild the renal function and promote hair health. The shipment arrived two weeks after the United States has implemented new prices on Chinese imports, so its distributor invoiced $ 115, an increase of $ 35 of its previous order.
Tran said she had no choice but to increase the retail price from $ 6 to $ 7. It is a steep increase for its customers, who are mainly Chinese elderly people living with food coupons, some barely capable of buying a piece of fresh fruit or vegetables.
The prices have exacerbated its already disastrous financial situation. Over the past three years, Tran has said that she had not made any profit, some months not even generating enough sales to cover the rent. And it will soon have to increase prices on the dozens of other products imported on its shelves, she said, including an abundance of Asian sauces, dry noodles, ginseng and ointments.
But at 58, she sees few other options. “At my age, it is difficult to find work elsewhere,” said Tran in Mandarin. “I take it day by day.”
Donald Trump’s murderous trade war with China is an existential threat to immigrant companies in the Chinese Los Angeles district – as well as in historical Chinese districts across the country, from New York to San Francisco – many of whom greatly depend on Chinese imports that have little alternative to the United States. While the tasks on Chinese products went to 145%, the owners of longtime stores, who sell everything, from jade stones to traditional medicine, say that they are preparing for financial benefits that could aggravate the losses they have accumulated since the first days of the pandemic.
Robert Lee is the owner of the third generation of Jin Hing Company, a small jewelry and antiques store cloistered on Bamboo Lane, a rest of the old Chinatown. Lee’s father and grandfather opened the shop in 1933, selling imported valuables like jade bracelets and rings, and antiquities dating from the Qing dynasty, like porcelain tobacco and clay tea bottles.
Jin Hing imports jewelry from a Chinese supplier once a quarter, and Lee said there were enough inventory for the coming months. But if the current prices are due to the fall, Lee said that he will have to start breaking into jewelry elsewhere – which will be heavier and expensive.
“If we did not have the building, we would have a lot of problems,” he said.
Prices also affect his export business, as American customers often buy antiquities to bring back to China. Since China retaliated with rights up to 125% on American goods, Lee said that the demand had dropped.
For Lee, 79, the trade war has brought back memories from previous years from the store. Before the historic trip to China of President Richard Nixon in 1972, the prices were high and trade between the two countries had been very limited. “We couldn’t have anything of China then,” he said, adding that his father could only import Hong Kong.
Community service companies such as grocery stores and plants based on plants are an integral part of the Chinese district, providing basic products at low prices to its large population of families and elderly, said Laureen Hom, the author of the power of Chinatown, a close study of the policy that shaped the district at the beginning of the 21st century.
“Chinese districts are an ecosystem with a residential, commercial and institutional component which is defined by and serves the American Chinese community,” said Hom. “When one of these components changes, he has a training effect on others.”
The commercial component has been declining for much of the last decade, with the latest full -service grocery store in Chinatown, the HOA IA market in 2019 after 30 years of operation. The closure of longtime institutions like Empress Pavilion, a banquet room that has led to gigantic lines for its SUM SUM, led pedestrian traffic, whose small businesses depended on survival.
In addition to a loss of wealth and history, Hom said, the decreasing influence of the Chinese district further reduces housing and employment possibilities for Asian immigrants from the working class in Los Angeles, an increasingly unaffordable city to live.
“The prices add to the current uncertainties to which Chinatown business owners were already confronted for several decades,” said Hom, such as “the growth of the suburbs, gentrification pressures of the city center and neighboring areas, and economic slowdown and anti-Asian feeling stimulated by pandemic”.
Some 12,000 people live in the Chinese district of Los Angeles, about half of which are Asian. Household median income is about $ 36,000, less than half of the county average. The Chinese community, although smaller than some other enclaves around the like Monterey Park and Alhambra, is a disproportionate working class and the elderly.
At the same time, Chinatown has undergone significant demographic changes in recent years, said Eugene Moy, a community historian and member of the Historical Society of Southern California Chinese.
As the district declared Moy, Moy, more wealthy residents, moved, attracted by apartments to the market and more recent and high -end restaurants and restaurants which are largely inaccessible to the tenants of the working class.
“There will always be low -income people whose revenues cannot follow this economic growth in the market,” said Moy.
For Mary Lu Wang, owner of the Jadetime E-Gift gift shop, these broader demographic changes and the continuous decline in tourism constitute a more immediate threat to her business than prices.
Wang, 74, said that she commanded new products every month in her brother’s factory in China, but that he is now only doing it once a year due to a lack of business. More than a decade ago, she had three gift shops in Chinatown.
She said that her shop included traditional gift items that cannot be found in the dozen other chinatown gift shops, such as hand-painted oil parasols, built with bamboo and wood, which are only made in her brother’s factory. She sells them at wholesale prices, but little yet, little purchase.
Last Tuesday, Wang won $ 27 on a few umbrellas; The next day, she won $ 58. A few years ago, she said that she often pocketed $ 400 at $ 500 per day. If the prices remain at their current rate when its inventory is low, it said it will surely have to increase prices – although it does not lose sleep.
“What is the point of worrying about what could happen in the future?” Said Wang in Mandarin. “No one is buying anything now.”
