We are working on an
about demographic changes in 16 counties in Central Illinois with our friends and colleagues at
.
For this project we are gathering many types of data and analyzing them.
From our analysis we generate findings that can serve as starting points for our investigations.
However, we are always aware that we are writing stories about people and communities, not numbers. As a result, after doing some analysis, we look to enter the community.
We seek to do so with respect and with the understanding that, while we have done the data work, we are not the experts about the communities.
In the past few months, we’ve stepped into Latino communities in
,
and
for our project about the health experiences of residents in Midwestern communities that have seen an increase in their Latino population in the past decade.
For this project, after seeing that there has been an increase in Asian health workers in Central Illinois from 2003-2010, we are learning about the Asian community in Champaign.
In nearly all of these towns and cities, we’ve started at the grocery store.
We’ve done so because we’ve found that these stores are often the first physical structure that gets established when the community reaches a certain size.
We’ve gone into the stores because the foods that are sold there represent one of the strongest connections people have to the homelands and family members they left behind.
And we’ve spent time in the stores because they are hubs of information for the community.
In Champaign we were driving along University Avenue when we saw the sign
” near the corner of Fifth Street.
We stopped near the store, walked in and started talking to the owners, the Diep family, about our project and the Asian community in the area.
As in Clarion, Iowa and Beardstown, Illinois, the store was a focal point and valuable source of information about the community.
From our conversations with the Dieps we learned about their journey from Vietnam to the United States in the late 70s and early 80s.
We heard about how they have, through ceaseless work, built the store and expanded their offerings in the past quarter century.
We saw how, while most of their clients are Chinese students at the University of Illinois, they have distinct food choices for their Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian customers, among others.
The Dieps also told us about
a store that caters to the area’s burgeoning Filipino community.
We went there next as our hunch was that a number of the new Asian health workers in the area are Filipino.
But as we drove to that store to continue our exploration, we did so with gratitude for what we had learned at our first stop and with a renewed sense of the importance such a store can hold for an immigrant community settling into life in a new country.
