Super Power
In a notoriously segregated city, shoppers of all races are flocking to a fast-growing supermarket chain called Super 88. Its founder triumphed through communist invasion, shipwreck, and fire. Now, he wants to change the way you shop for groceries.
WALK PAST THE CHINESE LION STATUES GUARDING THE AUTOMATIC DOORS OF SUPER 88 IN Dorchester's South Bay shopping center, and the first thing you'll see is "Rice City," a wall of 25-pound bags. The first thing you'll smell, if only faintly, are the fish tanks, where future fillets of tilapia, salmon, and butterfish swim out of sight at the far end of the store. Beyond Rice City spreads the produce section's crimson apples, yellow-green plantains, tan lotus root, purple Chinese eggplant, dark mustard greens, and orange sweet yams - almost every fruit and vegetable imaginable. This is what my girlfriend and I see as we venture into the market clutching a recipe for steamed winter-melon soup. Over speakers, a woman sings in Chinese accompanied by synthesized glissando and alto sax. It's Friday night. The place is hopping.
The majority of the shoppers are East Asian, but as we divvy up our shopping list, an African-American couple squeezes past us to inspect the okra and mint, an Indian woman plunks one tomato after another into a plastic bag, and near a cooler of tofu and bean curd, a mother comforts her toddler in quiet Spanish.
Similar scenes unfold daily at the chain's six markets across Greater Boston. Taken together, they reveal the face of a changing city and the vision of a remarkable family.
The owner of these supermarkets fled Vietnam after the communist take over in the 1970s. He and his family endured a shipwreck and months in a refugee camp before landing in Boston, and then, bit by bit, they built a new life and a budding business empire. Builders are set to break ground later this year for the seventh Super 88, in Malden, and the plan is to open one or two more every year. The new stores will go where the Asian population is growing the fastest, but there are even grander ambitions.
Around an increasingly diverse though notoriously tribal city like Boston, and with the explosion in popularity of Asian food, the goal is to make Super 88 a melting pot. If it succeeds, Super 88 could change the way you buy groceries. It could become a common ground for Boston's burgeoning immigrant communities. It is already well on its way to being the place where mainstream shoppers - who visit Shaw's or Stop & Shop for staples like cereal and milk - buy fresh produce, seafood, and exotic ingredients.
To pull it off, the owners will have to appeal to Western shoppers in a market dominated by behemoth chains without alienating their core Asian customers. They'll have to contend with several new rival Asian supermarkets and with traditional supermarkets that have added ethnic foods. And they'll have to do it all while managing various other businesses, including an ambitious venture in Vietnam. It is a family enterprise like few others, run by a deal-making dynamo whose business is more than just business to him; it's his hobby, his family, and his link between his new home and the one he left behind.
PETER LUU STROLLS BENEATH THE RED PAPER DRAGON THAT snakes from the rafters of the Super 88 in Allston. The 55-year-old wears a light-gray polo shirt and keeps his hands in the pockets of his dark slacks, except to inspect bunches of bok choy, greet a friend, or answer his cellphone. (He knows some English but rarely speaks it.) He's trim, with a full head of neatly parted brown hair. There's a calmness about him, as if he's lived several lifetimes, which in a way he has.
Born in Saigon of Chinese parents who had migrated to Vietnam, Peter grew up poor, one of eight children. As a young man, he pulled a rickshaw to deliver cement for builders until he saved up enough to open a construction-supply business in the early 1970s, eventually buying a warehouse and his own shipyard. Helped by his new wife, Muoi, Peter made his family very wealthy. "We had so much. We were so rich," recalls younger brother David Trang, who owns the Eastern Pier II restaurant in South Boston's Seaport District. "We lived in a mansion. It was like paradise."
Peter and Muoi's first child, George, was born in 1973, and a year later came a daughter, Cindy. In 1975, communist forces overran the country. The communist government capped personal wealth at $500, wiping out much of the family's fortune. So in 1978, along with about 300 other people, the Luu family crammed aboard a 72-foot fishing boat and set off into the South China Sea. On the first night, a storm blew the boat into a rock, and it sank. Several passengers drowned. The rest swam to a nearby island.
Days later, they were discovered on the island by Vietnamese soldiers, who fired into the air and ordered the castaways facedown on the beach. Everyone obeyed, except the Luu-family patriarch. Peter, trusting the negotiating skills that had served him so well as a businessman, approached the soldiers and persuaded them that the group had been on its way to China (which was legal - but false).
Peter "was waving his underwear as a white flag," David says now with a laugh. Although the refugees were detained for a couple of weeks, eventually Peter not only secured their release but also talked his way into another boat, supposedly to take them north to China. Instead, they headed south to a Malaysian island known as Pulau Bidong (Turtle Beach), a refugee camp. Six months later, the Luu family was sponsored for immigration by the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Boston's South End.
THE SUPERMARKET BUSINESS IS NOT TO BE ENTERED LIGHTLY. Hundreds of Stop & Shops, Shaw's, and Star Markets, some the size of football fields, blanket Massachusetts. Add to that a growing number of specialty groceries, like the cheaper Trader Joe's and the more expensive Whole Foods, plus the trend of drugstores and discounters like Target edging into the grocery business, and it's evident that competition is fierce.
But the story of the Luus' first years in Boston shows something about their determination. The family arrived at Logan Airport on a February evening in 1979. Still dressed for the tropics, they stared out of the plane's windows at the first snow they had ever seen. Peter remembers his great anticipation. "I always knew what the American system is like," he says as his son, George, translates. "Hard work will always prevail."
The day after arriving in Boston, Peter trudged through the snow into Chinatown, where he found work at a tofu factory, whose owner advanced him enough money to rent an apartment on Tremont Street. The church gave the family winter clothes and two mattresses, and the Luus moved into the studio that would be their home for the next two years. Another brother, Benny, soon followed.
Benny rose before dawn to make noodles and worked nights as a part-time bartender in Boston's Sheraton Hotel. "He used to come to work tired. I worried about him," Benny's former boss at the Sheraton, Bik Ng, says. "But now, it makes me happy, because the whole family is so successful." Benny later took a job busing tables in a Chinese restaurant on Beach Street. With his family's help, he would eventually buy the place and reopen it as Grand Chau Chow, one of two Chau Chow restaurants now owned by the Luus.
In 1982, Peter opened his first market, the Cheng Kwong Seafood Market on Essex Street in Chinatown, where he sold everything from squid, sea bass, and shark fin to whole pigs, ducks, and Chinese broccoli. When his kids weren't in school, they helped around the Cheng Kwong and, later, the Truong Thonh Liquor Store, which their father opened in 1985. At the Luu dinner table, the talk was of the family businesses - and their future. "My father would tell me, `You will be vice president and George will be president,' " says Cindy Luu of those days.
George, an avid basketball and volleyball player, remembers his father cautioning him against devoting too much time to athletics. "My father was always saying: `If you're going to spend a lot of energy that's not on work to better the family, it's just wasted energy,'" he says. And son heeded father's advice. By the time he was a teenager, George was Peter's most important business partner. Cindy, however, strayed from the family business, going off to medical school and becoming a doctor. But it didn't last. After marrying and having two sons, she left medicine and came back to work for Super 88 as a senior projects manager.
SOMETIMES THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD FORTUNE AND bad is a matter of perspective. This was certainly true for the Luus in the 1980s. The decade began well for them; the Cheng Kwong market thrived, and the family bought a house in Malden, where Peter and Muoi still live. But then, on a cloudy October morning in 1989, a man doing renovations with a welding torch - but no permits - on the second floor of a building that neighbored the Luus' market started a fire. Smoke quickly wafted into the Cheng Kwong. "I tell everybody, close door and close window, and then we left the store," says Peter. The Luu family watched from across the street as the fire spread.
"Peter was standing outside; nothing he can do about it," recalls his brother David. "That was the first time I saw tears come out of his eyes."
Firefighters were hampered by explosions from hundreds of pounds of fireworks that Peter kept in the upper floors to sell for Chinese New Year. (He would also be cited for illegally storing cases of beer and cognac.) In the end, the building housing the Cheng Kwong was saved, but the health department ordered nearly $70,000 worth of food destroyed. It would take some time to get the Cheng Kwong back in business. But, as it turned out, the building where the fire had started, which was torn down, had housed Ming's Market, which opened in 1978 and had until that time been Chinatown's number one Asian supermarket. Ming's would later reopen, but in another location, and from then on, Peter Luu would dominate the Asian food market in Boston.
By the early 1990s, Peter had an opportunity to expand. In 1993, he was elected to the business board of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Chinatown's establishment social-service and business organization. That year, the association signed a 10-year lease with him to open a supermarket in a building it owned on the corner of Herald and Washington streets in the South End. Years later, the state attorney general would investigate the benevolent association for misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from the Luus (and a prior tenant). The money had been earmarked for new affordable housing in Chinatown, but the association had used it for operating expenses, volleyball tournaments, and payments to its officers. The Luus were never accused of any wrongdoing, and in the end, the CCBA agreed to more intensive financial scrutiny by the attorney general but was not taken to court.
THE LUUS DECIDED TO CALL THEIR NEW MARKET "88," A LUCKY number among Chinese. "The `super' is from our customers," says George. "They always say, `Oh, you guys are super. Super 88.'" The name stuck, and the family prospered, because the Super 88 tapped into an underserved and growing group of customers.
Between 1980 and 2000, Boston's Asian population tripled to more than 42,000. The number of Asians in nearby cities also skyrocketed. In Quincy, for example, the Asian population climbed 157 percent between 1990 and 2000; they now represent 15 percent of that city's residents, about the same as in Malden. For many new immigrants, homesickness struck the stomach. "I missed the food so much," says Mei Hung, head of the Chinese Culture Connection, a Malden nonprofit, who left Taiwan in the 1980s and came to Belmont to work as a live-in babysitter. "I had to ask the family to let me cook Chinese food for them once a week, even though cooking was not part of my job."
Asian immigrants would travel miles to Super 88 for a taste of home. In 2002, the Chinese Student and Scholar Association at MIT began offering regular shuttle service, which the Luus encouraged with student discounts. Peter saw a potential market beyond Chinatown.
He opened the South Bay store in 1999, another in Allston in 2002, a small one in Quincy a year later, and one in Malden this year. Wherever the Asian population is on the rise, a Super 88 is not far behind.
The breadth of Peter's ambitions also led him into other businesses, including an liquor wholesale company, a driving range, and a golf course (both in Connecticut). Not all succeeded. Peter had attempted to open a tofu business in Virginia but returned to Boston in 1982. "He failed for the first time in his life," David says. The golf course closed this year, to the dismay of its members.
A few years ago, Peter and George opened their own import and export company, bringing in everything from frozen shrimp to chicken soup under their own label, which helped cut Super 88's costs. The Luus also bought part of a Thailand rice processing plant, helpful for a store offering more than 30 varieties of the grain.
Peter first returned to Vietnam in the late 1980s with George, who was then a teenager. They rented a scooter and toured Ho Chi Minh City. Peter pointed out the properties that the state had taken from him. "What was amazing to me was that my father brought me to all these places with a smiling face," recalls George. "He was confident that he would be able to take it back some day."
In fact, Peter's sister, who never left Vietnam, has since bought back some of the family property. And these days, Peter and George spend weeks at a time overseas trying to persuade reluctant Vietnamese officials to let them open a casino along with a five-star, 1,200-room hotel (with a projected cost of $150 million) that they have planned for the seaside city of Vung Tau.
"MY FATHER UNDERSTOOD ONE THING," SAYS GEORGE LUU, "AND that was we're in America, so the majority of citizens here are not Chinese. He knew that if we were going to grow the company, we had to become a melting pot." Indeed, ever since the opening of the Dorchester market, the Luus have been stocking Super 88s with more mainstream American products and more products familiar to shoppers from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. The Luus translated signs and labels into English and sometimes Spanish. George estimates that the Super 88s now carry about 8 percent non-Asian products, a figure he aims to increase to 30 percent.
A walk through any Super 88 shows this new diversity. Near the jugs of peach tea and drink boxes of lychee juice are bottles of "Coco Rico" (Puerto Rican coconut soda). Along with crackly bags of dried mushrooms and dark mats of seaweed, there are pork chicharrones and refrigerated hot dogs. An aisle's worth of soy and teriyaki sauces meets an aisle of beans, mole sauce, and Heinz ketchup.
The city's demographics seem to be tipping in the Luu's favor. As immigrants continue to pour into the area from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the 2000 census revealed that Bostonians are a growing jumble of ethnicities and that whites are no longer the majority. Still, despite a more diverse population, Greater Boston has never been a place of easy racial or ethnic mixing. Last year, a Globe headline summed up a Harvard population study this way: "Minorities, Whites Live in Separate Worlds."
But in the food court of the Allston Super 88 on a recent evening, shoppers of different races crowd together at tables chatting over a quick dinner from one of nine Asian restaurants on the premises. One of the evening's shoppers, Masako Yamada, 31, was born in Japan but grew up in the United States. "I'm always amazed at how many non-Asians there are here," she says. This reflects a point made by the Luus: Every region of the world has its own particular cuisine, but many staples, such as rice and fish, easily cross over.
Meanwhile, the Luus are also changing their product line and their workforce to get more Western customers through the door. In addition to hiring more English-speaking employees (now only about one-fourth of workers), Super 88 is still trying to shed the stereotype that Asian markets can be less than sanitary. This effort wasn't helped when Boston's Inspectional Services Department shut down the South Bay store for a few days in January over numerous health-code violations.
Then there's coaxing mainstream consumers into trying some of the more exotic items. Take the large, spiky durian fruit, which has yellow, custardlike flesh and a smell that takes some getting used to. A note by its bin explains: "What is durian," "Ways to detect ripeness," and "How to open." Still, some products may take longer than others to cross over. Balut, for example, is an Asian delicacy that Super 88 has carried for years. But Americans may be more familiar with balut -fertilized duck eggs containing embryonic ducks - as a recent $50,000 challenge on Fear Factor.
THE LUUS ALSO KNOW THAT EFFORTS TO BROADEN the appeal of their supermarkets could cost them some Asian customers. Take shrink-wrapped vegetables and meat. Mainstream American shoppers appreciate them, but more traditional Asian shoppers are suspicious of the practice and question the food's freshness. In many Asian countries, it's not uncommon to go shopping twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon.
"Chinese are very fussy shoppers," says Bik Ng, who teaches Asian cooking at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. "My mother doesn't even like things in the refrigerator. Once something's in the refrigerator, she thinks it's not fresh."
Last year, Massachusetts was the 10th largest Asian consumer market in the United States, according to researchers at the University of Georgia. The state's Asian buying power rang in at $8.7 billion in 2004, and the competition for those dollars is growing. In 2002, the Luus attempted to buy Ming's Market. In court records, the owners of Ming's, most of whom speak little English, claimed they were pressured into signing an English sales agreement and later backed out of the deal. The Luus went to court, but the sale fell through. The court settlement forbids both the Luus and the owners of Ming's from commenting.
Super 88, meanwhile, faces new competition from out-of-state chains. In 2003, Kam Man of New Jersey opened a massive supermarket and mini-mall in Quincy, and last year, C-Mart of New York opened two smaller stores in Chinatown. The Kam Man has a Hong-Kong style barbeque and a bakery. Wan Wu, the store's general manager, says the size of his store and its ample parking make it more attractive to the tens of thousands of Asians living along the South Shore than Quincy's Super 88.
Nevertheless, Wu thinks there's room for everyone. When it comes to serving the Asian consumer, he says, "We believe Boston is at least 10 years behind New York and five years behind California."
More competition comes from mainstream supermarkets that are catching on to the growing buying power of Asians and other minority groups. Steps from the Super 88, the Shaw's in Allston carries pigs feet in its meat section. It has an in-house sushi market right next to its
The Luus are confident they can meet these challenges. Peter says that even though he's largely handed over the reins to his son, he's not slowing down. "I never think about that," he says, and he recites a Chinese proverb: "If you hit a wall, don't just stand there and back up. You've got to climb over it."
Chris Berdik is a freelance writer in Dorchester. His last story for the magazine was "Voices From Abroad." E-mail him at rcberdik@hotmail.com. 