(repost from February 2013)
My two favorite supermarkets in my neighborhood are Great Wall and Super A Market.
Great Wall, as you may have surmised, is an Asian market. But unlike most of the Asian markets around here, the emphasis is on Chinese products.
This place is amazing. It’s larger than any of the Safeway or Giant supermarkets around here, and just about anything Chinese-food related you can find there. For example, on my last visit they had yellow chives, which I’ve never seen in any other Asian market. At $18.99/lb. I passed 🙂
They used to have maybe 50 aquariums with live fish….you can’t get any fresher than that!
They’ve now done away with the aquariums and just display fresh fish on ice. (This may or may not be related to their being busted [twice!] by Virginia authorities for selling live turtles as food. Honestly, I don’t see what the fuss is about, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if they had put up a sign saying “Pet Turtles” they could have skirted the law.)
Super A Market:
This used to be a dirty, nasty Magruder’s, but now it’s gone Latino, and is 10000% better :). Much like Great Wall and Chinese ingredients, this is your one-stop shop for Latino ingredients. Don’t like Salvadorean crema (cream)? Well, you can buy the Mexican version, or Honduran. Or Guatemalan, etc. It’s also the only Latino market around here that sells Oaxacan string cheese.
Super A has bargain prices on produce, and offaly-good prices like beef liver for $1.29/lb. and chicken gizzards/hearts for $1.59/lb. If only they had beef tongue for less than $5.99/lb!
As in many ethnic markets, English is the second language for many of their employees, so it can be frustrating to get help. This is less of a problem at Super A, but at Great Wall, the language barrier can be difficult to overcome. For things I don’t think I can find easily, I write down the names in Chinese characters.
What was the title of this post? Oh right, “Good Ole American Values.”
I loved the cinematic jumps in time/space/character in “Manhattan Transfer.” This book doesn’t use the same technique, rather the narrative is interrupted by Newsreels, Camera Eyes, and Bios. The newsreels are cut-ups taken from (actual) contemporary newspaper writing; the “camera eyes” are introspective, impressionistic recountings of events from Dos Passos’ life; and the bios are non-straightforward and surprisingly interesting biographies of political figures of the time (early 1900s), mostly lefties like Eugene Debs, since Dos Passos was a socialist at that point in his life.
And the language! Dos Passos said that America is its language. Even moreso than his interesting narrative techniques, his writing style is fantastic.
Some of his passages sound even better when spoken aloud, like the very first paragraph from “The 42nd Parallel.”
“The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench; blood tingles with wants; mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing and stinging; muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender’s pick and shovel work, for the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taught to hear, by himself, alone.”
Sheer poetry!
A bonus is that the book is just old enough (it was published in 1929) that the language, and even more so the spelling, are slightly anachronistic. Even putting aside the Dos Passos-isms (often omitting articles and possessives, mashing words together), his writing is very much a product of its time, which I mean in a good way.
So far I’m just 100 pages into the book, the first of a trilogy. 1100 to go 🙂
-R