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

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024