The Brief

Cruise down Broadway in Chinatown and Yue Wa Market is easy to miss. Not much bigger than a studio apartment, the store hides under a green awning, wedged between a souvenir shop and a pharmacy.

But inside, it’s been a place of connection. For 18 years, owner Amy Tran has greeted customers with a ready smile and hard-to-find produce like Chinese sponge gourd, yardlong beans and heart-shaped cherimoya.

One recent morning, Tran held up a bunch of moon drop grapes she bought at a downtown warehouse just hours earlier.

“Very beautiful,” she said in Mandarin as a group of retiree friends crowded around, murmuring in agreement.

Yue Wa Market specializes in Asian produce and harder-to-find food items like moon drop grapes.

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Satisfying customers is what Tran loves about running the market. But she said it’s time to let go.

This week is Yue Wa's last. Climbing rent and business drop-off since the pandemic — compounded by increased thefts and this summer’s immigration sweeps — have forced 57-year-old Tran to shutter her business.

She breaks the news to her regulars, largely Asian and Latino shoppers who live or work nearby, bouncing between Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish and her native Cantonese.

Yue Wa Market blends into the storefronts of Broadway in L.A.'s Chinatown.

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“The business is slow,” she said in English to a Thai customer, who looks crestfallen. “Everything not so good for us.”

A neighborhood cornerstone

It’s a story oft-heard across Los Angeles. Mom ‘n pop’s that anchor immigrant communities are disappearing under economic strain and gentrification pressures as new housing developments and upscale businesses move in.

Yue Wa is the latest grocery to close in Chinatown in recent years, leaving the neighborhood with fewer options for fresh food.

Ott Bhandhumani, a retired Thai caterer who lives in subsidized senior housing just blocks away, said Yue Wa has been essential for him and his wife. After Chinatown’s last two full-service grocery stores closed in 2019, just a handful of street vendors and small grocers like Tran’s were left.

Yue Wa's closure leaves Chinatown with fewer options for those who live and work in Chinatown to buy fresh produce.

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“I came to this place only because she was nice to me,” said Bhandhumani who wishes now he was more of a "big customer" at Yue Wa.

For Tran, the decision to close comes after years of struggle.

Business never rebounded after the pandemic, when many shoppers left Chinatown, some to move in with families like in the San Gabriel Valley, she said. Many of the newer residents skip shopping at an old-school, Chinese-style market where prices aren't listed and haggling is expected.

“She doesn’t want to let go of the store,” said her son, Derek Luu. “But she just feels very hopeless about the situation.”

Family support

Luu, a filmmaker who works with AIDS nonprofits, came home from New York this month to help his mom close up shop.

He grew up in Yue Wa Market, which his mother bought when he was 10.

Before becoming a shopkeeper, Tran held an assortment of jobs in Chinatown after emigrating from Vietnam with her Chinese family — from waiting tables to working shifts at a bakery. For a spell, she was driving to different businesses, hawking plastic shopping bags.

“I remember our living room was just kind of swimming with boxes of bags,” Luu said. “She has always had this entrepreneurial spirit.”

Derek Luu, Amy Tran's son, came home from New York to help his mom close up shop.

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The previous owner of Yue Wa sold herbal supplements and tea before approaching Tran to take over the business in 2007. She at first added yams to her inventory for its medicinal properties. But at customers’ request, she kept expanding the produce section until stacked crates of fruits and veggies spilled onto the sidewalk.

As a teen, Luu pitched in at the store after finishing classes at his arts high school a short walk away from Yue Wa.

He returned there to work during the pandemic, leaving UCLA so he could protect his mother from the surge in anti-Asian attacks from strangers.

“They would come in, take product and throw it into the street,” he recalled. “They would yell slurs at my mom. It got to a point where I just felt like I needed to be here.”

Since the pandemic, thefts have become a weekly occurrence — with losses ranging from stolen register money to pilfered fruit. CCTV shows both Tran and her sole employee, 75-year-old Shi Zong Xu, being robbed. The family estimates they’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars over the last several years.

Seventy-five-year-old Shi Zong Xu, Amy Tran's sole employee at Yue Wa Market, plans to retire after the store closes.

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Tran reasons that more people are suffering hardship, and will often just give away food or cash if she sees someone loitering around her shop.

Tran took out loans to keep the shop afloat as the monthly rent rose to $3,450. But the strain only deepened. The ICE raids this summer scared off some longtime customers and vendors. And then the family became crime victims in their own home.

A family crisis

The family, which includes Tran's husband Hugh and younger child, Tiffany, saw their San Gabriel Valley home go through several break-ins — likely by criminals targeting Asian households in the region, they've been told by investigators.

Luu said in the most recent incident in June, his sister was assaulted and injured. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating, has not identified the suspects.

Seeing her daughter suffer has been crushing for Tran.

Amy Tran and her son Derek Luu speak with a neighborhood friend.

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“My mom just ran out of things to say to my sister,” says Luu. “She felt like she didn’t do enough to protect us. I told her she didn’t fail. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

To help her out during this time of transition, Luu started a GoFundMe for his mom, who herself is dealing with diabetes and cataracts.

Tran doesn’t share her family trauma with customers. She only tells them she can’t afford to stay in Chinatown.

Customers adrift

For regulars, the closure is a heavy loss.

“It makes me upset,” said Sarah Mondol, a nursing student who shops weekly at Yue Wa for her family of six.

She relies on the market for produce like okra, cauliflower and eggplant to make traditional Bangladeshi dishes. “Everything is fresh, and it’s convenient to where I live.”

Mondol said she’ll likely start taking the bus more often to a full-service grocery store about two miles away.

Yue Wa regular Sarah Mondol says she was sad and upset the market was closing after making weekly visits for the five years she and her family have been living in Chinatown.

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“I can go to Smart & Final, but you know, there are not good Asian vegetables I can find there,” she said.

Bhandhumani, the retired Thai caterer, has been battling cancer and said he often doesn't have the strength to shop far from home.

He can’t begin to guess what will replace Yue Wu, but said Chinatown is changing to where it’s not so much for older people like him on a fixed income.

“You can see that they have a new apartment come up, and the price [is] sky- high,” Bhandhumani said. “You can't touch it. We can’t do luxury.”

Tran hasn’t heard what will open in her spot. All she knows is she must be out when her lease ends this month to clear the way.

“Everything that doesn't sell, I’ll try to store it at home,” she said.

Tuesday is her last day. She’s inviting customers to stop by to pick up some tea or fruit, pose for a picture or just say hello — one last time.

Where to go

Yue Wa Market
658 N. Broadway, Los Angeles
(213) 680-4229

The city of Long Beach has proposed cutting library hours and laying off librarians to help balance its budget. In response, educators, the local library foundation and union leaders are pushing back, saying the city can’t afford to lose a vital service for kids and families.

Under the budget proposal, five of the city’s 12 libraries — Bay Shore, Burnett, El Dorado, Harte and Michelle Obama — would drop from six days of service back to five, losing their Monday hours just a few years after those hours were added. (The city’s other libraries were already closed on Mondays, and all are closed Sundays.)

On an average Monday, those branches see a total of more than 1,000 visitors, according to city data.

“In a city the size of Long Beach, and with our population, we could be seeing a 2027 where there are no libraries open on Monday. I think that’s pretty crazy,” said Kristen Hernandez with the Long Beach Public Library Foundation. The nonprofit, which raises money for the local library system, is gathering signatures on a petition protesting the cuts. As of Friday, it had more than 1,800 signatures.

Changes to the city library system are a sliver of the cuts unveiled last week by Long Beach City Manager Tom Modica as part of a citywide winnowing in programs and services to close next year’s expected $58 million deficit.

Beyond cuts to programs and facility hours, Modica proposed laying off more than 260 city workers and cutting more than 200 additional vacant positions — about 4% of the city’s roughly 6,000-person workforce.

The proposed library cuts

Local libraries would lose 14 positions, 11 of them currently filled, including five library clerks, four library assistants, a vacant general librarian position at the Billie Jean King Main Library, and a mental health associate who serves as the library’s teen specialist. The plan also cuts funding for library pages who stock books and funding for security services, as well as nearly all print and digital newspaper subscriptions.

The combined cuts would save the department a little more than $1.4 million.

Elizabeth Cespuglio, a librarian at Billie Jean King Library, said that the library assistants at risk of being cut are responsible for planning and running workshops and programs at the branches, pulling materials, tracking which books and genres are most in demand and staffing the information desk. Clerks handle check-outs, check-ins and library cards, while pages keep the shelves organized.

Perhaps most at risk, Cespuglio said, is the library’s mental health associate, Jasmin Flores, who spends her days building rapport with teens in need. Losing that specialist, she said, leaves her “quite fearful” for the patrons and staff alike, since the library’s other social worker focuses on unhoused adults and doesn’t have the time and energy to build the same relationships with youth.

Each day, Flores is the calming face for more than a dozen kids. Many of them are in and out of homelessness; some have been in juvenile detention. Others are LGBTQIA and struggle to find friends; others struggle to find food. She’s already told some that she may not be showing up anymore. It’s a difficult conversation, she said, having to console others for the loss of her job.

“It honestly breaks my heart that I probably will not be in that position anymore,” she said.

Flores’ main worry is that some of them will stop showing up. “We’ve built that rapport, and it hasn’t been easy to build,” she said. “It’s taken a while to get there, and I just hate to see all that go to waste.”

Librarians say they’re already stretched thin

The real problem, Cespuglio said, is that libraries are losing funding even as they’re increasingly in demand — more than 2,800 patrons visit daily across Long Beach’s 12 branches, an 8% rise since last year. The number of programs offered has increased by 50% in the past year, with more than 1,000 adult participants.

Annually, city libraries have continually climbed in foot traffic since the onset of the pandemic, though averages are still lower than in 2018 and 2019.

Branches have been understaffed for more than a decade, Cespuglio said, at least since the last time the city announced library layoffs in 2012.

“There’s still an expectation on the system for us to be doing all of these things and continue the same level of service as we’ve done,” she said. “Cutting those hours, or those Mondays, not only does it impact the public’s access to the library all over the city, but it has these other ramifications in the rest of the five days that the rest of us are working.”

The looming cuts have created an “undercurrent of anxiety” among staff who still don’t know which of them may lose their jobs, according to Cespuglio. Her own position is not at risk, but her partner’s is, and she said the possibility of losing half her household income is real. She said that rent in Long Beach has outpaced her pay raises for the 12 years she’s lived and worked in the city.

The bigger budget picture

The library cuts are part of a far larger fiscal reckoning for Long Beach.

The proposed layoffs stretch across more than a dozen departments and offices, hitting fire, police, homeless services, parks and libraries alike, as the city grapples with rising personnel costs, mounting legal payouts, the loss of federal grants and a local economic slowdown that has weighed on tax revenue.

City officials have said the strategy of previous years — pulling from cash reserves to delay layoffs — is no longer sustainable; the city drained tens of millions of dollars from its reserves, including its emergency fund, just to close out the current fiscal year.

Sashi Muralidharan, a labor representative with the city’s largest union, IAM Local 1930, said they will “fight for every job,” even as labor negotiations — which coincide with the budget talks — are looking grim.

Eighty percent of the positions proposed to be cut are represented by IAM, including 209 filled positions.

“Anything that does result in a layoff, we will be bargaining over those impacts to make sure that we lessen the negative impacts,” Muralidharan said.

At a Long Beach City Council meeting this week, nurses, union shop stewards, library staff and other city workers turned out to protest the cuts, arguing they would bring greater ramifications to the public’s quality of life and further enervate its remaining staff, pushing them to look for work elsewhere.

Nate Kim, a city nurse and negotiator with IAM Local 1930, told the council that while his own position had been renewed, many of his colleagues had not been so fortunate. “Many have been laid off already,” he added. Emily Quest, a resident who uses the library’s free craftspace, begged council members through tears not to cut the hours or the staff who run it.

Mayor Rex Richardson has proposed restoring 70 of the positions slated for elimination and said the city remains on track for its first structural budget surplus by 2028, even as another deficit, projected at $27.3 million, looms for the following year.

The City Council is expected to hold public hearings on the budget through the summer before a final vote in late September. You can find a schedule of hearings to attend here or fill out an online survey to share your priorities with the City Council, which must debate and pass the budget by Oct. 1.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Two months after an oil spill shut down streets in East Los Angeles and disrupted businesses along the Cesar E. Chavez Avenue corridor, many owners are still waiting for reimbursement.

The May spill forced street closures after crews punctured an underground pipeline, sending more than 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto nearby streets and into storm drains. Along the commercial corridor, owners of restaurants, barbershops and bike shops had to cancel appointments, delay deliveries or close their doors for a week as cleanup crews worked in the area.

What the spill cost businesses

In the days following the spill, a survey of nearly 50 businesses near the intersection of East Cesar E. Chavez and Eastern avenues found a 70% to 75% loss in revenue, according to Kelly LoBianco, director of the LA County Department of Economic Opportunity.

“You know how the barbershop gets on a Friday. … We lost a lot of business that week,” said Barber Avila, owner of Brooklyn Lab Barbershop. Avila preferred not to share his first name for this story.

For the past month, Avila has been working with LA County and pipeline operator Pacific Pipeline System (PPS) to submit documents – including tax records, sales reports and expenses – to show how the spill affected his business and file a claim for reimbursement.

Avila said his claim was approved this week and he is now awaiting payment.

Reimbursement has been slow

Many other businesses are seeking reimbursement from PPS, but the process has been slow, LoBianco said.

As of Tuesday, 19 businesses had filed claims. Only one had been approved, while three others were close to approval, LoBianco said. She did not have details on the amount reimbursed.

Veronica Ramos, co-owner of Ramos Industries, a commercial and residential glass and aluminum contractor, said she was reimbursed by PPS a week after submitting a claim. The spill caused contracted jobs to be canceled and deliveries to be rescheduled for a fee because trucks could not access the shop.

Ramos said her business had a bookkeeper who was able to quickly gather the required documents but she worries her neighbors may struggle to provide the needed records for a claim.

A PPS spokesperson said claims are still being accepted and processed. A third-party claims administrator has been helping businesses with the filing process in English and Spanish, the company said.

“We understand how important a timely resolution is for those affected and remain committed to working through each claim as efficiently as possible,” PPS said.

Cleanup could stretch into 2027

What lies ahead are months of soil testing and excavation to remove contaminated soil from the site of the spill, which county officials say could continue into January 2027. Neither Avila nor Ramos knew about the remaining work and worried about how additional street closures could affect their business again.

“It’s good to keep it in mind,” Ramos said.

Was your business affected by the oil spill?

Anyone who believes they were impacted by the oil spill can still contact the PPS claims line at 1-877-817-5465 to be connected to a third-party administrator who can guide them through the process in English and Spanish, PPS said. There is currently no deadline to submit a claim.

The Department of Economic Opportunity’s Office of Small Business (OSB) is continuing to provide guidance on claim preparation, documentation requirements, and submission for affected businesses. To book a one-on-one appointment, businesses can:

• Call OSB at (844) 432-4900,
• Visit OSB’s East LA Entrepreneurship Center located at 4716 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., or; 
• Email osb@opportunity.lacounty.gov. 

All impacted businesses seeking assistance should indicate that their request is related to the East LA oil spill.

How to avoid scams:

Rafael Carbajal, director of the LA County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) said bad actors may prey upon communities during environmental disasters like the oil spill including contractors and legal services providers.

Carbajal said the DCBA office is helping residents verify contractors, legal services providers and is providing information on their website on how to recognize scams.

Residents who have concerns or questions can call the DCBA hotline at (800) 593-8222.

Composer Charles-Henri Avelange has wanted to find a way to honor firefighters with music since the 9/11 attacks.

Last month, that longtime dream started to take shape when over 85 orchestral musicians working in Hollywood gathered at a Sony Pictures Studio soundstage to record the “Fireman's Prayer.”

The poem, written by Alvin William “Smokey” Linn, was inspired by an apartment fire in 1958 in which three children died. It’s something every firefighter learns to recite.

Not long after moving to the U.S., Avelange found the Fireman’s Prayer inscribed on the wall of a firehouse in 2006 — and began singing a melody.

Avelange asked the firefighters whether the piece was already set to music. “Because to me, this is not just a prayer, it's an anthem,” he said.

Twenty-four hours later, he had written the first draft of the anthem.

Charles-Henri Avelange.

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A $100,000 vision, and no idea how to pull it off 

Avelange’s vision was to have 200 to 250 musicians, including a children's choir, full adult choir, full orchestra and a 56-piece drum and bagpipe corps for the recording, which costs nearly $100,000. All proceeds from the song would go to firefighters.

 “Everybody who knows me eventually always heard about the Fireman's Prayer,” he said. “I have no idea how or when it will get done.”

Composer Charles-Henri Avelange has set the poem, The Fireman's Prayer, to music.

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The Fireman's Prayer project

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Then the January 2025  fires hit Los Angeles. Avelange and his wife found themselves just blocks from a Palisades Fire evacuation zone. They could see the firefighters protecting homes on their street.

“My wife, Jennifer … looked at me and she said, ‘Well, if this is not a sign, Charles, this thing is needed. It is really time.’”

Thanks to private donations, Avelange recorded with the Los Angeles Children’s Choir and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in May. He is still fundraising to record  the Pipes and Drums of California Professional Firefighters performing.

Last month, he was joined by Grammy-winning conductor Grant Gershon and many of Hollywood’s best musicians — some are survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires — to record the orchestral portion of an anthem he had heard only as digital samples for nearly 20 years.

Joining them in the audience were members of the firefighting community.

 “When I heard them playing, it sounded exactly the way it's supposed to and actually even better,” he said. “It was quite a magical moment.”

This is a developing story and will be updated. For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:

• CalFire incident page
• City of Burbank
  

Evacuation orders for DeBell Restaurant and Golf Course and Stough Canyon Nature Center remain in place for a fire burning in Wildwood Canyon above Burbank.

Evacuation warnings for Churches Ct. and Country Club Drive were lifted at 6:20 p.m.

As of 5:55 p.m., the fire had burned 40 acres and 70% contained, according to Burbank.

The Walnut Fire broke out Saturday afternoon near the intersection East Harvard Road and Wildwood Canyon Road.

Hiking trails around the area are closed. The Starlight Bowl concert scheduled for tonight has been canceled.

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If you have to evacuate:

• Why fire officials don't want you to stay and defend your home
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• What evacuation terms mean and how to sign up for alerts

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How to help yourself and others:

• Resources for fire victims, evacuees and first responders
• If you want to help fire victims, resist the urge to volunteer
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How to start the recovery process:

• What to do — and not do — when you get home after a wildfire
• How to make an insurance claim
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• How to talk to children about wildfires and losing a home
• What parents should know about wildfire air quality

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