A few things come to mind when I think about Asian snacks. Japanese rice crackers remind me of the dusty corridors of the music academy I’d walk through before the piano lessons of my childhood; Strawberry Pocky transports me to Vancouver’s Fraser Street, peppered with stuffy pan-Asian stores playing Filipino TV in the background; and Boy Bawang garlic corn nuts (or cornick, as they call them) bring me back to summer evenings, my dad snacking on them while drinking beer with his friends. (The corn nut doesn’t fall far from the cob.)
Flavors help us traverse two different worlds, a culinary flashlight that guides the diaspora by means of familiar flavors. They carry once-banal memories we never thought we’d yearn for, pieces of our history we never thought to miss.
For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM), I made a trip to 99 Ranch Market for the first time, exploring both the familiar and the new, traipsing through the aisles upon aisles of snacks at this Asian grocery emporium to find the most colorful, flavorful, unmissable offerings.
I’m not a Bay Area native, so before this assignment, I’d never been to 99 Ranch Market — or Ranch 99, as the locals call it — but it immediately felt familiar; the West Coast staple reminds me of its Canadian equivalent, T&T Supermarket, a Garden of Eden for Asian food products. Walking through the store, my mouth watered as I passed the kimchi section, and the spiky durian on display reminded me of my late aunt, who often carried some in her purse for later — much to the chagrin of everyone within a 30-foot radius.
I left with a full basket of colorful packages and a clear objective: Find and rank the best snacks (many of which were recommended by our followers on Instagram)! Unexpectedly, even the snacks I’d never tried transported me somewhere in this new context.