Maybe five weeks back, a friend living in Tokyo hit me up online about groceries. This was after the first confirmed coronavirus case in the States, but before the inertia of global inevitability we’re all stuck in now. He said I needed to stock up on Tylenol and rice, and whatever the hell else I needed to make myself comfortable indoors, without restaurants, for an extended period of time. When I asked why, he sent a link detailing the virus’s spread from metropolis to metropolis. Then he sent six more.
“You don’t want to be sick going to the grocer’s,” he said. “And you don’t want to be fucking around at the grocery store if you aren’t sick.”
In Houston, preparation is tied to the city’s topography. Harris County’s share of upper- and lowercase storms in the past few decades has produced a reliable equation: if there’s even a whiff of an emergency on the horizon, our grocery stores begin to fill. The shoppers tend to move in waves: there’s your First Wave, folks who just triple up on everything, because they’re older or they’re preppers or they’re refugees, or maybe they’ve just seen some shit in their lifetimes. Then there’s the Second Wave, folks who surface after the plausibility of an emergency coalesces (more folks of color). There’s the Third Wave, once the emergency becomes imminent (the stores get crowded), and then the Fourth Wave, after city officials legitimatize the Bad Thing. That’s when you end up texting in line, hunched over your cart for hours.
So that weekend, just before everything started getting cancelled, my boyfriend and I made our rounds around town. First, to El Ahorro Supermarket and Fiesta Mart, for beans and eggs and tortillas and paper towels. We hit Phoenicia Specialty Foods, a Mediterranean grocery on Westheimer Road, whose shoppers piled carts with pita, garlic, and lamb. Then we went to a Super H Mart, just outside the city’s inner loop, for face cleanser and chicken and shrimp, and then to another H Mart, in Bellaire’s Chinatown, near where I live, for everything else. We found shelves full of chili oil and Clorox wipes and curry blocks. It only took a few hours.
In line, at one point, I asked the register guy if they had any Tylenol, and he tossed two boxes into my basket. When I asked if they had any face masks, he laughed. “How about you tell me where you find some,” he said.
Watching the shelves empty all over America on Twitter and Instagram, you’d think everyone in this country only shopped at Sprouts or Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. But Houston is diverse, and its grocery stores reflect that. We’ve got loads of little markets catering to their respective communities, and folks in parallel communities pass through them routinely: African markets in the corners of strip malls, sprawling Asian markets, Latinx groceries in clusters. They carry the staples for their respective flavor profiles (furikake, Scotch-bonnet peppers, ancho chilies, and thirty-four varieties of doenjang), but they sell basics, too. If you can’t find toilet paper at Seiwa Market, chances are you can find it at Karibu Mini Mart or Viet Hoa International Foods. And if they don’t have it then there really is a problem.
Two weeks later, as the work-from-home decrees came down, and I started missing a spice here or a morning croissant there, I popped by my neighborhood grocers to stock up. I could tell that things were starting to get strange. But, for most of my local stores, business went on as usual. In a market tucked inside the Hong Kong City Mall, lines weren’t any longer than usual. Families stalked the produce aisles, fingering cilantro and scallions (scarcities elsewhere), juggling cannisters of Lysol wipes and packages of flour (which had disappeared throughout the city). Every fourth shopper wore a mask. Every other shopper wore a pair of gloves.
At H Mart, I grabbed a bottle of citron tea by the register and was weighing whether it was worth five bucks when the woman behind me asked if I wanted to trade it for ginger-lemon. I looked hesitant, but the dude behind the counter wiped both bottles down and handed them back between gloved fingers.
These grocers had—right along with their counterparts in emergency services—helped keep their cities running. But once I got outside, walking to my car, a white guy behind me yelled a loud “Hey!” I turned, thinking he was talking to me. But the target of his anger was an Asian woman halfway across the parking lot. He yelled “Hey!” again, fuming, pointing to an abandoned shopping cart. He seemed, for some reason, to think she had left it there. He asked the woman what the fuck she thought she was doing.
The woman and I exchanged looks. I walked over and moved the cart, waving her away. The guy gave me a long stare and climbed into his truck. Two kids sat in the back seat, blinking through the windows.
Last month, the mayor issued a stay-at-home order, signalling that we’d be navigating this situation, together, for some time. But the burden is not distributed equally: besides nurses and doctors, caregivers and delivery people, grocers are on the front lines. They don’t get to work from home. God forbid that we’re anything but grateful.
I ventured into a decimated Whole Foods the other day and managed to snag the last pecan pie. At the register, I asked the cashier, a Latinx dude, how it was going. He looked sleepy. But he smiled, and said that the day had been chaos. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve got this. But it’s gonna fucking suck.” ♦
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