Lim Chhour Supermarket and Food Hall, sitting at the heart of Karangahape Road (K Road), holds an Asian migrant hustle story that often goes untold.
The Lim Chhour brand is well known for its fruits and vegetables to the Asian community in Tāmaki Makaurau, being one of the city’s first Asian supermarket chains in the 1990s.
Paying tribute to the building’s cultural and historical significance is musician Jefferson Chen, aka Goodspace, by setting up shop in the food court for the release of his album Let’s Talk About Death from September 28 to October 4.
He says it’s a place he’s always wanted to reactivate and the space has been waiting to be tapped into but he’s never seen it properly done.
“Lim Chhour Supermarket has always been a main feature of my childhood, and I love a cheap and cheerful feed,” the 32-year-old says.
“I had an album ready and I play gigs regularly on K Road, so it was the big intersection of so many things, it would have been impossible not [to] jump on that.”
The Vendor installation was propped up at the far right corner of the building, where the food court meets the supermarket, and Jefferson acted as the vendor. Customers could read the song list on a menu and dine in to listen to his music.
“It is a tribute to the migrant vendors who come to New Zealand, set up shop and they just hustled.
“It’s [also about] recycling and reframing familiar language especially within the Asian vendor context – the colours, the fruit crates, the menu style, and the kind of rough, endearing quality about it.”
“Within the hustle of being an artist… it’s a luxury to make art, but there is a hustle there as well,” he says.
“I think it’s nice to bring a few different layers of hustle into a space that is built on pure grit and hustle.”
And pure grit and hustle it was
Lim-Muy Chhour is the daughter of the late Lim-Nam Chhour, the man who founded and grew the Lim Chhour brand.
To escape war-torn Cambodia, where the Cambodian genocide saw up to two million lives lost under the Khmer Rouge regime, they fled to Vietnam, Thailand and then finally Aotearoa in 1984.
“We were [at the Thailand refugee camp] for a number of years waiting for a country to sponsor us and New Zealand was the first to sponsor us as refugees,” Muy says, who was only about two years old when she got here.
She says her father didn’t have any qualifications so he worked at a factory, but it was difficult for him because he was always a businessman.
“In Cambodia… he had his own motorbike shop. Even in Vietnam… we had an ice cream shop.”
She says the Lim Chhour brand started with a small dairy in Auckland’s Birkenhead, which was against their sponsor’s advice because her parents spoke limited English.
“My dad said to my sponsors, ’I can serve customers, I know how to say hello, how to say thank you, how to say goodbye, how to do maths, I know how much change to give them’,” she says.
“Looking back, I guess you could agree that was pretty crazy that someone that had very limited English wanted to buy a business.”
Muy says her father found a niche market for their dairy to sell fruit and vegetables, then sold the dairy for a Hobsonville farm, and eventually saw the need for Asian groceries.
That’s when several supermarkets opened around Auckland, in Henderson, Ōtāhuhu, Glen Innes, Mt Albert, Remuera, Parnell and finally Karangahape Road.
Her father’s drive to succeed and their war-torn past
While all the supermarkets are now independently owned, the Lim Chhour building on K Road remains with the family and Muy is the property manager.
She gets emotional as she talks about how difficult it was growing up. She says she and her siblings were taught to work everyday, and they worked at the shop before and after school.
“You do compare yourself a lot to other kids in school, and you can’t imagine what their lives are because yours is just completely different,” she says.
“But in saying that, it was hard, but I also feel very blessed because my parents taught me something that can never be taken away.”
Muy remembers her father as the most hardworking person she knows.
“He would work day and night, even in the evenings, he would be thinking about how he could grow his business… even in the weekend. He’d never really rest.
“I think when you’ve been through civil war… when you see your fellow citizens tortured, being forced to hard labour, starvation, to reduce to skin and bone, is something you’ll probably never forget, [it’s] something I can never comprehend.
“I think when you have that kind of horrific experience in life, the drive is quite different to normal society. You’re exposed to a lot of nightmares of the world.”
She says that drive to always succeed and improve wasn’t just for himself but for their family and the community.
“That’s one of the things my father believed in that once we got to a point in our life, he was like, how can I give back to the community?”
In 2002, Lim-Nam Chhour was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to the Chinese Cambodian community.
“He donated hundreds of thousands [of dollars] to many charity groups, not only within New Zealand but also back home.
“Helping a lot of villages set up as well so they could get fresh water, helping amputees get their life back on track.”
Significance of the Lim Chhour building on K Road
The Lim Chhour building has been on K Road for 22 years and Muy says it signifies Asians are also part of our society.
“You can come and be able to cook the dishes you love and it’s an important part of culture to be able to maintain that traditional cooking.”
She says the building also epitomises what K Road is about.
“It’s accepting people from different walks of life and different cultures. It doesn’t matter where you’re from.
“We have such a diversity here on K Road, it’s fantastic. You’re not judged for whatever, everyone’s accepted here.”’
By Vivien Beduya for Re: News
