On coming of age on the other side

A culinary trip down one of the busiest streets in Portland

What you’ll never see is the other side of all this fanciness—the side where many Asian immigrants have settled and made a living out of. The side where herds of cars drive up and down every single day, over potholes that always seems to pop out of nowhere, where used car dealerships dominate the business scene, where home prices are generally lower, and where I’ve spent the past several decades of my youth. The side that you might not call ‘cool’ but nonetheless an important part of Portland’s history.

The story begins with my uncle.

My mom’s older brother is one of the boat people. He and his wife and daughter was one of the first wave of refugees who left Vietnam right after the war ended and eventually landed in Portland. Over the years, five more children came along, and by the time my family arrived in 1995, they were living in a modest three bedroom ranch style home on the northeast part of town.

I call the home ‘modest’ because even though it would be considered large by modern standards, it was rather cramped when there is a family of eight mixed with my own family that left little room for privacy.

Thus, I shared a bedroom with my cousins Jane and Mai. Jane was closest to my age, five years younger while Mai was much older, probably in her early twenties when I came. In Vietnamese culture, many children live with their family even in adult age, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for my eldest cousin to be living at home. Vietnamese kids don’t generally move out until they get married, and even then, not move out at all.

It would be many more years before Mai got married. In the meantime, the twelve of us cozied up in this house for several months until things got stultifying (as in, “I feel like I can’t breathe with this many people in the house”) and my family and I moved out, into an apartment on the corner of Mill Street and 82nd Avenue in Portland. Thus begins my decades-long relationship with a street known as one of the grittiest streets in town.

The best place to find a lot of sauces is an Asian supermarket on 82nd

82nd Avenue is a twelve mile stretch of road that begins by the Portland Airport. Coming off NE Airport Way, you’ll see this diversion, veering off into a series of hotel chains including the Embassy Suites, Red Lion Hotels, and so on. Once you’re officially on 82nd Avenue, the landscape changes to incorporate a few small homes dotted along the street with many, many small businesses, the bulk of which are car dealerships and Asian-owned restaurants.

I have mixed feelings about 82nd Avenue. It is, after all, the street of my adolescence, the one that I take every weekend with my mom to the grocery store, where she does most of her shopping, and where I did the exact same thing as a young adult in the early 2000s. It’s a street that gave me my first job at Wendys, where I failed miserably because I ate too many French fries and chicken nuggets without paying for them. It’s a street filled with history and rebellion and low income folks, where you can find the best slices of immigrant experiences up and along the road, all the way to Clackamas Town Center, where it diverts into Sunnyside Road and thus, into a much more affluent suburb called Happy Valley.

Inside Hong Phat Supermarket

82nd Avenue is a street that housed my high school, once named Madison High, but now has a different name. Across the street is El Burrito Loco, a longtime Mexican joint where my husband went for lunch a lot as a teenager (I never went though) because they served enormous burritos, and where Pho Oregon exists. Pho Oregon is in my opinion, one of the best pho restaurants in town. It opened in the late 90s before I began high school, and during my high school and college years, my husband (then boyfriend) and I often went there for a quick bite. It’s clean, well-lit, and tastefully decorated, plus the food generally comes quickly. On many occasions, after our stomachs were filled with a comforting bowl of soup, we’d hop over to the French bakery, located behind the building that houses the restaurant, for a baked treat, the kind that left crumbs on the floor and around your mouth, but that is so tasty it felt like a major indulgence to spend $3 on a single pastry.

There, down the hill, is the cusp of the freeway, where it intersects with I-84, which will lead to various points around the city—north, south, and eastward connections will take you on a different journey than the one you’ve been in. Past the freeway connection, there a Pizza Hut that is no longer there, the place where I used to go to as a teenager to get a small $5 pie and ate it happily and greedily. Oh, the joy of eating greasy pizza and not worrying about calories.

Beyond that is a Thai restaurant that burned to the ground several years ago, but now replaced by a food cart pod serving a variety of cuisines. The string lights they erected are beautiful and inviting. After that is the biggest success story that 82nd has ever seen—a thriving Asian supermarket called Hong Phat rising in the place of a failed Safeway. There are a constant stream of cars in the parking lot, making it one of the busiest Asian stores in town.  Prices are generally higher than Fubonn Supermarket, another giant shopping behemoth dreamed up by someone who wanted to make that space between Division Street and Powell Boulevard more appealing by turning it into a strip mall. It’s a place where you can do your grocery shopping, get some Korean food, Vietnamese soups, and sushi at the same time, where a small bakery called Meianna serves up the most delicious buns every single day.

The front of Hong Phat

But the story doesn’t end at Fubonn. Past Powell (arguably the busiest intersection of all time) you’ll see a Wal-Mart, a Dollar Tree, a bank, a post office, a Burger King, food cart pods, a sushi restaurant, and a Lee’s Sandwich Shop, a national banh mi chain run like an American restaurant.

Perhaps the best place on the corner of 82nd and Holgate Boulevard is HK Café, a Chinese restaurant that is always bustling with activity, no matter what time of the day or what day of the week it is. To me, it’s not surprising because they do have some of the most delicious dim sum in town, plus crunchy crab puffs that melt in your mouth in a deliciously satisfying way.

Of course, there are so more many places and things that make up the culture of 82nd.  The fancy pho restaurant that Vietnamese people don’t normally go to. The bubble tea shop called Karma Café that was one of the very first cafes to offer free wi-fi in town but now replaced by something else that is not nearly as cool. The large Asian supermarket located in an old Fred Meyer that never made an impression on me. The Chinese medicine shops where you can find interesting smells and concoctions, where people speak very little English; also, the Chinese restaurant that was around for 76 years but that are no longer around. And so on and so forth.

To capture the essence of a street like 82nd in the culinary sense forces me to think about how it has changed and ways it has not changed in the past few decades. What’s changed is the introduction of several new buildings that houses nonprofits like the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) where they host night markets prior to the pandemic to bring people in the community together. What hasn’t changed is the potholes (which is an endless source of gripe), the used car dealerships (although there is slightly less of them now), and the people who live and work and go to school there. It’s always bustling with activity and traffic, some of which are unsavory, but nonetheless, encapsulates a street that is so fundamental to the Asian American experience.

82nd Avenue is for many, a coming of age experience, when living in luxury isn’t an option. It’s a street that defines them, and defined me, a place with colorful characters and experiences on the bus. It’s a place marred by inequality and low incomes but it’s also a street that defines many generations of immigrants as they continue to live, work, and raise their families. There is evidence of gentrification happening but for now, it’s a place where you can get some pretty fantastic food, far beyond what you’d get at Pok Pok, Salt & Straw Ice Cream, and Jake’s Grill. It’s an unpretentious kind of place, a place where you can be both anonymous and part of a community at the same time, and perhaps, over time, leave a piece of yourself there.