Just a few minutes away from the busiest part of Rockville, New York Mart stands in a little corner of Rockville, attracting both immigrants longing for the comforting taste of home, and those who want to explore the vibrant flavors of Chinese cuisine. The supermarket was opened in 2015 and is cluttered with delightful oddities that go far beyond the traditional chain supermarket. The market has a buzzing atmosphere—there’s a food court filled with hawkish vendors selling fare reminiscent of China’s street food scene, a storefront filled with antiques, Buddhist imagery, and Chinese furniture, and an entire aisle lined with rows of condiment jars. Much of the ingredients are common in Fuzhonese cuisine, as the majority of the customers are immigrants from Fujian. “There’s a lot of people from Fuzhou here. There’s a lot of people and dishes from other places too, like Si Chuan cai (cuisine), Hunan cai, spicy food, and non-spicy food,” Kiki Chen, who immigrated to America twenty years ago, said. “For example, I like to eat Shui Zhu yu pian (boiled fish), which is spicy.”
Chen makes the 30 minute drive from Silver Spring every once or two months. Each time, she leaves with a full cart of groceries and ingredients she can’t find elsewhere. “It’s an Asian supermarket,” Chen says. “Chinese people tend to like Chinese food and flavors because it’s familiar…I just don’t like eating pizza, Subway, Dunkin Donuts, or McDonald’s everyday.” Chen switches between Cantonese and Mandarin with ease, bartering with one vendor about the price of soup buns in one language and switching to the other to converse with the store’s manager. In all, Chen spends an hour and thirty minutes wandering the aisles, oftentimes coming back to the same section to reexamine the freshness of the lamb, or the fish that are left for the day. When she finally enters the checkout aisle, it’s with a cart full of food and a feeling of progress as she slowly begins preparation for the upcoming Lunar New Year. Speaking about everything from arriving in America 20 years ago, to learning English and picking up Spanish, to teaching her children Chinese, Chen offered a glimpse into the demographic that immigrant supermarkets such as New York Mart attracts.
