The first supermarket-style store was started by Tin Wah Yu, a Western-style doctor from Hong Kong in the late 1960s. He couldn’t practice medicine in the U.S., so he started a grocery business to feed his growing family. He and his family came along at a crucial time in Oakland Chinatown’s history, when it was suffering from post-World War II blues. The Yu family helped revive Chinatown, which had a renaissance in the late 1970s and 1980s.

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William Wong was born and grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown. He went on to a distinguished journalism career (The Wall Street Journal, Oakland Tribune, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer). He is the author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America (Temple University Press, 2001) and Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown (Arcadia Publishing Co., 2004).

Visit his web sites, http://www.yellowjournalist.com and http://www.oaklandchinatownhistory.org.