At Asian food market, a sign of lost confidence

A customer loaded a bag of rice into her shopping cart at Uwajimaya Asian supermarket in Beaverton, Ore., recently. (Matthew Ginn for The Boston Globe)

Last in a series of occasional articles

BEAVERTON, Ore. - Day after day this spring, Don Sakai arrived at the Uwajimaya supermarket he manages here to see his largely Asian-American clientele piling their shopping carts high with big bags of rice grabbed from pallets at the front of the store.

Sakai knew customers were buying far more than their families could ever eat. Unlike other retailers, like Costco and Sam's Club, which responded to such signs of hoarding by limiting customers' purchases, Uwajimaya decided not to ration rice out of concern that such a move would only perpetuate a sense of crisis.

Instead, in April, Sakai put up signs asking for understanding about the global factors that had been working all year to push prices for jasmine, basmati, and long-grain white rice upward and now indefinitely threatened the store's supply. Much of Sakai's explanation was already familiar to shoppers: heightened demand from developing countries, poor yields from the year's crops, and export limits freshly imposed by producing nations trying to protect their own citizens.

That did little to stave off the panic. "It was difficult," said Sakai. "Rice is a major staple item for our customers. They eat it every day and the thought of going without it scared them."

Empty rice shelves encase a fear that has transcended American culture, as consumers have learned that things they saw as entitlements - food staples, fuel for a commute, toys, and toothpaste free of poison - could no longer be taken for granted.

"I was like, 'What is going on?' " said Peter Park, a 28-year-old Willamette University law student who moved to Seattle from South Korea when he was 15. "This is the last country that I thought would run out of food."

In the Pacific Northwest, such unease threatens a notion of middleclassness that has been central to the collective identity of an Asian-American community.

"The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, but if you were in the middle it didn't affect you. In the middle, you felt safe," said Sho Dozono, the president of Azumano Travel, a Portland-based agency that operates in three Northwestern states. "More people are concerned about the economy now."

Until recently, this year's presidential campaign had stood apart from others waged during economic downturns for its single-minded focus on consumer challenges over those faced by workers, investors, or producers. In 1988, voters' hackles were raised by the specter of foreign ownership of American assets. Four years later, it was the collapse of savings-and-loans institutions. In 2004, candidates tangled over service jobs being sent abroad.

Until bank failures triggered a national credit crisis last month, the 2008 lexicon of economic anxiety was one learned at points of purchase. There Americans confronted the first threat in a generation to the "right to plenty," part of the melding of American consumer culture and its notions of citizenship during the postwar period, said Elizabeth Cohen, a Harvard historian and author of "Consumer's Republic."

"As consumers, we are becoming increasingly dependent on other countries and their trade practices. We've seen that around jobs," said Cohen. "It is seen as more American and less radical to talk about citizens and voters as consumers."

The family-run Uwajimaya, opened in 1928 to serve familiar staples to Japanese immigrants living in Tacoma, Wash., has fought to remain the hub of a regional ethnic community whose members are now linked less by where they live than how they buy.

As second- and third-generation Asian-Americans have dispersed to suburbs, traditional cultural institutions such as Nisei Veterans Committee clubhouses struggle for members. One of the few things that pull people back to Seattle's International District, once the center of Asian life in the Pacific Northwest, is Uwajimaya Village: a square-block development including an apartment complex, Japanese-language bookstore, and food court offering Filipino sausage and Hawaiian-style rice balls.

"When you look at most ethnic groups, they revolve around food and they revolve around church," said Naomi Kakiuchi, a nutritionist who teaches cooking classes at Uwajimaya stores.

The newest Uwajimaya branch opened a decade ago in Beaverton, a multiethnic suburb home to Nike's corporate headquarters, where it occupies a big-box site along a four-lane highway down from a Target and Payless ShoeSource, the last stop on the march of Asian entrepreneurship from ethnic enclave to middle-class suburb.

"If they come out here it means they either are more Americanized, have a little more command of the language, or they still believe in the American Dream," said Michael Wong, a Beaverton Chamber of Commerce volunteer.

In Beaverton, that sense of bourgeois comfort has led residents of all ethnic backgrounds to assert their local identity through consumer culture. Some championed a successful movement to banish Wal-Mart. Reacting to the dominance of national retailers, Wong helped to create Nodd's Neighborhood, an online directory highlighting Beaverton-based businesses.

Rising prices for gas and food threaten the "concept that we'll pay a little bit more, travel a little bit farther to patronize the small local businesses and get to know the local owners," Wong said over coffee one sunny morning on the patio of Ava Roasteria, which he prefers to Starbucks. "I'm afraid that when gas prices rise . . . at some point they're just going to go to a Target."

In Egypt, Haiti, and Bangladesh, rice shortages quickly triggered springtime riots. But as details of the global food crisis coursed through Asian-American communities via the media and word of mouth, a peaceful panic took hold as easily.

For Peter Kwon, whose family regularly purchases a dozen 50-pound bags per week from large retailers for its JC Teriyaki restaurant in North Everett, Wash., the rations meant driving from store to store to find enough rice to feed customers. "Sometimes you'd go and you'd find there's a long line and no chance you'd get it, so you'd go on to somewhere else," said Kwon, often waiting on two or three lines a day.

While food prices for most American consumers have increased over the last two years - thanks in large part to jumps in gas prices and the new value in using agricultural products as an energy source - Asian-Americans have felt the increase most acutely. The cost of jasmine rice, a staple of southeast Asian and southern Chinese diets, doubled.

"I'm a little concerned that rice is more expensive because I typically put people on a rice diet," a hypoallergenic alternative to wheat, said Jieyi Zhang, a Beaverton doctor who practices traditional Chinese medicine.

For the Seattle-based Asian Counseling and Referral Service, rising prices threatened to challenge the mission of a food bank founded two decades earlier because other charities distributed only pasta and potatoes. "A lot of food banks in the Seattle area represent mainstream communities, and they don't see the value in providing the food that Asians eat," said Gary Tang, who oversees the food bank.

In January, once 50-pound bags of Thai jasmine rice hit nearly $40 each, up from $17.50 a year before, the group started buying a far less expensive alternative - domestic short-grain rice - instead. In April, facing the threat of shortages, the food bank furthermore cut its serving sizes per family in half.

"That may have contributed to other people hoarding, because they thought that if the food bank is having problems . . ." said Melinda Mizuta, the group's spokeswoman.

Uwajimaya's circular is a weekly experiment in the new consumer psychology. Where the store once promoted bargains on exotic products to entice customers, the advertised specials are now more likely to be once-cheap cuts of meat - like pork offal and beef shortplate - central to basic homestyle cooking.

"Every retailer is a little bit afraid," said Darryl Neault, manager of the meat department at the Seattle store. "You can't raise the prices on staples too much. It's when milk and bread and the staples go up that people panic."

Already, high gas prices have forced a change in shopping patterns - consumers who may have once planned weekend family trips to Uwajimaya are now more likely to make a quick stop on their nightly commute - weakening the store's role as a de-facto community center.

To Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam, the decision to abandon his car because of those rising costs triggered an identity crisis. "For immigrants, the car is the first thing we buy before the house," Lam wrote in a column in the "International Examiner," a newspaper for Seattle's Asian community.

"Vietnamese in Vietnam marvel at the BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes that their relatives drive in America and no doubt the sleek photos sent home cause many to dream of a life of luxury in the United States."

Already, the country's economic condition appears to be deterring new immigrants; census figures show the foreign-born population grew by only half the average rate of increase between 2000 and 2007. The Northwest's role as a magnet pulling Asians across the Pacific may be threatened by the flagging promise of a middle-class lifestyle.

"You'll find some of the businesspeople will use their language and cultural advantage to build their wealth and go back to China," said Dozono, the entrepreneur who ran for mayor of Portland earlier this year. "I would see doing business and traveling may be very attractive, but being an immigrant here might not be as attractive as it was 20 years ago."