Strip Mall Chinatown
MT Supermarket and Asian American Architectural Commercialism in Austin, Texas
A familiar, sentimental scent: fish, durian, perhaps a biting edge of kimchi… Each Asian grocery store has a unique scent that washes over visitors as soon as they pass through its doors. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, this olfactory demarcation of a unique spatial threshold is still present in hundreds of institutions across the United States. As of a 2016 US Census estimate, there are nearly 20 million Asian Americans living in the US. This constitutes a large potential customer base of Asian consumers, but also indicates the potential for expanded marketing of Asian food to Americans at large. A Euromonitor study found that American consumption of Asian fast food grew 135% between 1999 and 2015, not to mention a global increase of almost 500%. Clearly, as the Asian American population has increased, a growing demand for Asian food has led to changes in food retail trends in the U.S., leading to the emergence of a new building typology: that of the Asian supermarket.
Growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, the biggest Asian market in town was called Lynn’s Oriental Market. Clocking in at just a few thousand square feet, the dusty, sun-washed shop felt spacious and luxurious in comparison to the scale of most things in Tallahassee: a whole world of candies, fresh vegetables, and fine porcelain. We would stop by for top quality sushi rice, a new tub of Gochujang, or Chinese jelly sticks as a summertime treat. Adjacent to the shop was Mike’s Seafood, formerly associated with Lynn’s, and one of the two Indian grocery stores in town. This was a little mecca of Asian culture in an otherwise average Tallahassee strip mall on the southeast side of town, and for Tallahassee’s small Asian population of just around 8,000 people, it was enough.
Lynn’s Oriental Market in Tallahassee, FL. Google Street View, April 2019.
The first time I came to MT Supermarket, located on the north side of Austin, Texas, I was astounded that an Asian grocery store could possibly be so huge. As of 2018, the city’s Asian-identifying population made up more than 8% of its total, endowing Austin with the ninth largest Asian population out of any of the nation’s thirty largest cities, and the number one fastest-growing. The total Asian population of the Austin-Round Rock area numbered around 161,051 people as of 2018, and for the last ten years at least, Austin’s Asian population has been its fastest-growing racial demographic.
MT Supermarket, however, has been a fixture of Austin Asian American culture for many years before the recent population boom. Tom and Thang Lee moved to Houston from Vietnam in 1979, and migrated to Austin in 1983 to open My Thanh Market. For years, the store was one of the only of its kind in all of Central Texas, serving Chinese, Taiwanese, and other Asian goods to customers from as far away as San Antonio and Kileen. By 2006, the Lee family had expanded the newly renamed MT Supermarket to a 65,000 square foot complex, the crown jewel of Austin’s Chinatown Center. The gigantic strip mall plaza on North Lamar Boulevard is home to numerous Asian businesses; additionally, the Lees own two chains of pho restaurants in Austin, Pho Saigon and PhoNatic. This small, family-owned Austin Asian food empire physically manifests in a unique architectural presence in the North Lamar neighborhood just south of Braker Lane.
MT Supermarket, the anchor of Chinatown Center, April 18, 2020.
Of particular note regarding Austin’s Chinatown Center is the fact that it is, as the New York Times put it in a 2014 writeup, a “manufactured” Chinatown. The sprawling complex of shops and restaurants, mainly of Vietnamese and Chinese ownership, does not have a corresponding residential district of Vietnamese and Chinese people surrounding it. In fact, as of the 2010 census, the census tract in which MT Supermarket is situated had an Asian American population of less than 5%, and none of the tracts immediately adjacent to it broke 7.5%. This Chinatown is an outpost of Asian culture, perhaps one that arose before a core geographic district of Asian Americans had the chance to coalesce in Austin. This demonstrates the fact that from the conception of this Chinatown, it was intended for explicitly commercial use, and that most of its shoppers are willing to commute from other areas to get to it.
Asian American Population in Austin, TX, with Chinatown Center’s census tract highlighted. Austintexas.gov.
The sprawling parking lot of Chinatown Center is another of its defining characteristics; it seems to serve a number of purposes outside of those related purely to the automobile. Chinese New Year celebrations are held each year, and the rows of parking spots light up with food vendors, performers, and revelry. During an afternoon of observation on a rainy day in April, I observed two separate individuals using the back of the lot, near the ceremonial gate and statues that front North Lamar Boulevard, as a drop off point from a car full of people, potentially to walk further to the nearby Chinatown Station bus stop. This is an outdoor space that is utilitarian and impersonal, but also contains hidden dimensions beyond what one might expect.
As of May 2020, 59% of businesses in Chinatown Center, taking their lead from the Vietnamese origins of the Lee family, are Vietnamese. A further 17% are Chinese; 20% of storefronts are vacant; and one Korean restaurant and an American insurance company finish off the roster of 41 retail spaces in the plaza. Until recently, three retail spaces were occupied by Japanese home goods store FIT, modeled loosely off of international chain Daiso, but its storefront is now shuttered.
Chinatown Center’s store ownership by ethnicity, May 2020.
Considering the overwhelmingly Vietnamese demographic of the plaza, it is curious that the exterior architectural forms of its buildings borrow so many Chinese features, not to mention the plaza’s name itself. The roots of this style, not atypical for an Asian American commercial district, can be traced back over one hundred years. T. Patterson Ross and A.W. Burgen, the two men hired to redesign San Francisco’s Chinatown after the 1908 fire that ravaged the city, created a highly stylized vernacular of Chinese referentialism dating back to the Song dynasty, a sort of safely exotic architectural wonderland for American tourists. This highly stylized architecture proved alluring to non-Chinese visitors and led to a begrudging acceptance of Chinese culture in the Bay Area, as well as a more than begrudging economic embrace of Chinatown.
Austin’s Chinatown Center embraces many of these formal flourishes: the otherwise typical strip mall facades of the stores are accented with quintessentially Song Chinese faux-glazed red tile, and MT Supermarket itself is framed with the elegant upward slant of a pagoda-style roof. Directly opposite the giant grocery store is a ceremonial gate and three pink statues of Chinese deities perched underneath. This structure is far removed from the pedestrian domain, several hundred yards from the entrance to any of the stores, and is clearly not intended for literal use as a processional piece of architecture. Acting as a sort of miniature temple gate, but constructed from the same typical strip mall building materials as the rest of the plaza, the gate is essentially a large billboard advertisement for vehicle traffic passing by on North Lamar. Framed with the phrase “Chinatown Center,” one word on each bay of the gate and separated by Chinese script in the center reading simply “中國城,” or Chinatown, the entire plaza is a beacon of referential Orientalism designed to succinctly proclaim its foreignness to passersby, both Asian and not. Again, this speaks to the unique programmatic siting of a cultural district as a commercial destination intended to be reached primarily by car. The gate is a visual threshold from the ordinary domain of North Lamar into the uniquely Asian architectural (and commercial) realm of Chinatown Center.
Chinatown Center’s commercialized ceremonial gate. April 18, 2020.
Back across the giant parking lot, the entrance to MT Supermarket continues to employ several quintessentially Asian features. Fountains full of koi fish articulate themselves into stone corrals for shopping carts, complete with floating faux water lilies and statues of dragons and turtles lining the edges. Here, the ceremonial fanfare is at the scale of the not just the pedestrian, but of the visitor almost inside the store. “Come,” the fountains seem to beckon, “Take a cart. Come inside. These aren’t ordinary shopping carts; these are Chinatown shopping carts.”
The stylized fountains at the entrance to MT Supermarket. April 18, 2020.
Upon stepping through the automatic doors into the store, one comes upon a common feature of many American grocery stores: a sort of threshold or foyer full of toy machines, ATMs, and discarded shopping carts. However, outside of the usual vernacular, two ornamental potted trees frame the doors to the actual sales floor of the store, still adorned in banners from Chinese New Year. Off to the left, placed quietly in a corner, is an altar complete with food offerings, a smiling Buddha statue, and a small, curious trash can off to its side. A sign on the adjacent window asks visitors in English: Please do not sit in front of Buddha. This feels less like commercial signaling to visitors and more like an authentic gesture by the store owners; it is not meant to be flashy, rather, it is as private and intimate as it could possibly be in the entryway to the store.
Entry threshold altar, April 18, 2020.
Upon crossing through the final set of doors into the store, one is greeted by an Austin Police Officer perched on guard to the right of the door, as well as a sign asking visitors to check backpacks at the customer service desk. This immediate focus on security can be a bit disarming, breaking the immersion of the Chinatown cultural district that the strip mall has worked so hard to create. However, the feeling is quickly reestablished by the awe-inspiring scale of the store laid out before the officer.
The interior design and layout of MT Supermarket itself follows curious conventions which seem to draw on both American and Asian grocery store typologies. Its massive, 65,000 square foot floor area is lined with fresh produce, dry goods, beverages, rice, fresh fish, frozen goods, meats, household items, and more. Overhead, walls overlooking many of the major sections of the store are painted in delicate pastel hues and adorned with large red letters proclaiming the goods beneath them in Vietnamese, Chinese, and English: thịt tươi, 肉類部, fresh meat.
Bright colors provide visual distinction between different departments of the sprawling supermarket. April 18, 2020.
The spacious format of MT Supermarket is atypical for grocery store commercial models in Asia; due to space concerns in large cities and the cultural practices of open-air markets in smaller towns, American-style grocery superstores are relatively uncommon in most countries. Also of note is the practical effect of departmentalization by type of good: this is a truly international store, where Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese chip brands sit side-by-side on the shelves. With the exception of a few more specific sections for things like specifically Japanese sauces, food is grouped regardless of national origin. This organizational style is distinctly Asian American, particularly for MT Supermarket, whose origins lie in service to the entire Asian American community of Central Texas.
However, the organization of goods within MT is not always completely clear-cut. The boundaries between sections blur together: the meat department, adjacent to the homewares and dishes, hosts a row of small ceremonial altars atop refrigerated packages of beef and pork, seeming to have bled over from the incense aisle across the way.
Packaged meat, housewares, and altarpieces converge. April 18, 2020.
Sometimes, the discordant organization does not seem to be the result of bleedover at all, but rather utilitarian use of space even among so many thousands of square feet of it: fake trees line the tops of the frozen aisles, plastic watering cans are strewn atop the beer cooler… These moments of intrigue among the gigantic sprawl of the store separate it from more highly corporatized and regulated chains like H-Mart or 99 Ranch, both of which have recently opened up shop in the Austin area, threatening to price out family-run institutions like MT.
Moments of organizational discord among the aisles of MT. April 18, 2020.
Usership demographics of the store present a curious mixture of conditions. While two billboards outside of the store’s entrance are plastered with flyers and notices written almost entirely in Vietnamese, the store is awash with Chinese visitors on Sundays after church. The truly international mixture of products does not privilege these two cuisines over others, including even some Indian and other Desi foods. Additionally, it is not just Asian American Austinites who utilize the services provided by MT Supermarket. In just a ten minute observation period at 6:50 pm on April 18, 2020, twenty nine separate parties of one to three people entered or exited the store. Of these, 17 parties were Asian, four were African American, three were white, and five were Hispanic. However, it is possible that the COVID-19 crisis, in full swing by this point in the United States, could have been contributing to depressed visitorship, particularly among non-Asian demographics.
Two makeshift community bulletin boards to the right of the store’s entrance. April 18, 2020.
The beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, before the thousands of deaths and shelter-in-place orders, revealed itself in large part through Sinophobia. Online message boards and even casual, off-handed comments blamed exotic Chinese culinary tastes for the start of the epidemic, although of course there is no comprehensive knowledge of where the disease precisely originated from other than its first confirmed case in Wuhan, China. In the US especially, where immigrant communities are frequently lambasted and made to feel ashamed for the supposedly strange things they eat, Chinese Americans were subjected to comments about eating bat soup, and Chinese restaurants were seeing massive drop-offs in business. In early 2020, as news of the pandemic spread from China to Asian American communities back in the US, Chinese restaurants initially saw a decline in visitorship from their Asian customers. As the disease spread to the US and Sinophobia intensified, by April 2020, roughly half of the nation’s Chinese restaurants had closed, some temporarily and others permanently. Additionally, anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise, and sites like 4chan saw major spikes in Sinophobic slurs, memes, and conspiracy theories.
However, as the virus developed into what was a clear global crisis and began to have direct effects on daily life in the United States, grocery store shelves across the country began to be cleared out of many staples as people began anticipatory supply hoarding ahead of what many feared could be a Wuhan-style complete lockdown. In the face of these shortages, many online pointed out that Asian supermarkets in their areas seemed to be well-stocked and under-trafficked. A reddit user on the r/Austin forum remarked: “MT Supermarket was pretty ‘business as usual’ last night, though sold out of mochi and popsicles for unknown reasons. Plenty of rice and noodles still.”
As the world progresses through the COVID-19 crisis and eventually comes out on the other side, the role of physical grocery stores will be again and again called into question. Does the American model of supermarket organization make sense in a pandemic or other global crisis? Should we really have such an absurd quantity of goods available under a single roof at all times? How do people respond when this source of goods, which seems practically limitless in the daily American psyche, is threatened? Asian supermarkets like MT present especially fascinating case studies, as Sinophobia and panic-imposed resource scarcity combat in the minds of Americans. For a complex which has worked so hard to architecturally brand itself as Chinese, it remains to be seen how bigotry might manifest into negative effects on business. In the midst of the chaos, however, one thing remains clear: MT Supermarket and all of its compatriots have cemented themselves as vital aspects of American culture in the lives of many, and the unique typologies which they present are curious urban experiments in commercialism and identity.
Works Cited
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