Chinese snacks display
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718 S King St International District
206 / 623-5124 x133 tour information
-enter by joining a Wing Luke tour
-take a look through the windows anytime
Both Howard King and Jimmy Mar passed away after this interview was recorded.
Interview with tour guide, Howard King
Today the only way to get inside Yick Fung is to join a group tour offered by the Wing Luke Museum.
Yick Fung's last proprietor was Jimmy Mar; tour guide Howard King describes Mar’s history as a community leader: “He was a lieutenant Colonel in world War II, so it was very unusual for a Chinese guy to be that high up office. He’s been the funeral director for Chinese community for the past 60 years. He's still doing it--but at a lot slower pace.”
Mar worked at Yick Fung for 70 years before retiring, in 2008, at age 92. After Mar donated the store and its contents to the Wing Luke Museum, Yick Fung was rebuilt down to the last detail inside the new museum building: “So this is what they store looked like. In fact, see, the windowpanes say 705. They even moved the windowpane because physically this store was in the other building, near 7th Avenue. This is 8th Avenue right here. So they even moved the windowpane up here to make it look like the original store.”
Howard King is uniquely qualified to lead tours of the store: when King was growing up in the 1940s his father owned the import-export business next door to Yick Fung: “My father was at 707, so that's why I say we were neighbors. See but my father would carry similar things, too. So we were competitors.”
Neighborhood kids would stop in this shop or another like it for afterschool treats. Even small change would buy “brown candy”--a block of compressed sugar--or a taste from one of dozens of glass jars filled with various dried and seasoned fruits: “'Cause as a kid, instead, when we had to buy snacks like a candy bar, we don't buy candy bars. We'd come in a store like this, and get snacks like this. So see there's quite a variety; you can see there’s grapes, mangoes...All these are sweet and salty, and some are sour. Like the ginger, you know, is kind of, I don't know, a gingery taste. It tastes like ginger. See, there’s the mangoes, that's a sweet thing, sweet candy. Cherries are kind of sweet candy. Things like that.”
Today tour groups snap photos of the now-sealed glass jars.
“Are these things in here for, like, forever?”
“Yeah.”
“So how old is the stuff that sits in these jars?”
“Oh, I don't know how old. But you gotta realize in China there's not a lot of refrigeration. So they learned to preserve a lot of food items. So what you see in these bottles are the preserved fruits, they're dried so they're still good. In fact in 2008 when we giving tours here Jimmy Mar would give us snacks out of here. So they're still edible; it's just that they may not look as appetizing to somebody, that's all.”
“I'm sorry: you're saying that if it's dried it's good forever?”
“I don't know how long forever is, that's all, but like I say, in 2008 we would eat out of here, yeah. It's dried, so I think it's good for another 20 years.”
“O-kay...”
A remarkable number of jars contain dried plums: some spicy, some sour, some sweet: “It’s a dried fruit and it’s got a seed in there, most times it's got a seed. And then you just kind of put it in your mouth and you bite off, chew off the meat part, and leave the seed. And spit out the seed. So that's the technique, is to bite just hard enough to take off the good part and leave the seed in your mouth, and then spit it out.”
For those who might not have got the hang of that, there's a jar labeled "Tourist Plums": they're safely seedless.
A remarkable number of jars contain dried plums: some spicy, some sour, some sweet: “It’s a dried fruit and it’s got a seed in there, most times it's got a seed. And then you just kind of put it in your mouth and you bite off, chew off the meat part, and leave the seed. And spit out the seed. So that's the technique, is to bite just hard enough to take off the good part and leave the seed in your mouth, and then spit it out.”
For those who might not have got the hang of that, there's a jar labeled "Tourist Plums": they're safely seedless.
