After more than 100 years, Ming Wo will close its kitchen shop in Chinatown
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2020 03:16:59 +0000
Ming Wo has been a fixture at 23 East Pender since 1917, which makes it the oldest retail outlet in Chinatown and one of the oldest in the city.
Not for much longer. The building was sold for $3.4 million in December, and Ming Wo will be closing in a few months.
“It was a very difficult decision to make, but it had to be made,” said Fontaine Wong, whose family has owned the store since its inception.
Retailing in Chinatown has been tough since the 1980s, largely because the neighbourhood is next door to the troubled Downtown Eastside. But Ming Wo soldiered on, a destination for generations of Vancouverites who loved its incredible selection of cookware and beautiful heritage building.
The Chinatown store is still profitable, but not as much as its newer sister stores in the Lower Mainland. So the Wong family decided to sell the building and leave Chinatown.
The decision was hard on Fontaine Wong, 65, who has never worked anywhere else.
“This has been the most wonderful place to grow up and work in, all my life,” she said over the phone.
“And that’s not just because I’m a family member, it’s just the best (place). I don’t think of it as a job, I think of it as an extension of my life. That sounds corny, but if you could see me now, the tears are running down my face.”
The entrance to the Ming Wo store at 23 East Pender.
Ming Wo was founded by her grandfather, Wong Chew Lip, who moved to Canada from Kwong Chow (Canton) in southern China about 1908.
“It was (originally) a hardware store, Ming Wo hardware,” said Wong. “It slowly evolved because of the demands from the area, from Chinese restaurants. Hardware stores were more of a general store; restaurants had demands for woks and dishes and things like that.
“Because of the language, (Chinese immigrants) would shop in their own community. So that was where the demand was created, and that’s where we slowly evolved.”
Wong Chew Lip became a stalwart of the community. His 1971 obituary said he was the president of the Chinese Benevolent Association, the Wong Kung Har Benevolent Association, the Wong Sun Society and the Hon Hsing Athletic Club. He was also chairman of the board of trustees of the Chinese-language Monkeon School.
His son Norman was instrumental in helping Ming Wo adapt with the times. It became a cookware-only store in the 1960s, when Chinatown was at its peak, brimming with nightclubs and restaurants.
“You had the Marco Polo, Yen Lock, Bamboo Terrace,” said Fontaine Wong. “The Green Door. The most famous one was Ho Inn.”
The exterior of the store.
But Chinatown went into a long, slow slide in the 1980s from which it hasn’t recovered.
“(The Downtown Eastside) has slowly encroached into the area, spilling over,” said Wong. “In the last 10 years, it’s been quite a noticeable change.”
Civic historian John Atkin does a lot of work in Chinatown, and says the historic neighbourhood finds itself in a “weird era.”
“We’re trying to do stuff with Chinatown to make sure that Chinatown survives, and yet we’ve got this drifting social issue, with the drug issue and homelessness, that is really impacting the neighbourhood,” he said. “Folks don’t want to come down because of the (social problems nearby), so business suffers because folks won’t come down.”
Jordan Eng of the Chinatown Business Improvement Association said the neighbourhood is trying to work with the city to make improvement. But working through the bureaucracy can be very time consuming.
“The problem with the city right now is that it just takes forever (to open a new business), the city is so slow,” said Eng, who is a realtor. “Some of these places that look empty are in fact in process of having new restaurants going in. But if you don’t ask the city the right way, they can tie you up for months, even in a new building.”
The new owner of the Ming Wo building is Mukesh Goyal, who said the 1913 building is in fine shape.
“Ming Wo is still in there,” he said. “If they decide to leave at some point, we’ll probably restore the building. It’s a Heritage A building … it would be nice to research and see what it looked like in 1913 when it was built, and take it from there.”
A restaurant used to operate upstairs at Ming Wo, and the name is still written in tile.
The interior of the store is one of Vancouver’s most beloved retail spaces.
The Wong family has operated the store since day 1, and retained many heritage items.
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