The Instacart Rebellion

In which my mother rejects both Instacart and my life choices (but not Lay's barbecue chips)

Wait. Why do the Cinnamon Cheerios look like doughnuts in a bowl?

Victory Denied

“Too many sweet things,” she mutters, digging through the box of Paris Baguette pastries. “Hmmph. Look at the time; 11:20 is time for salty food, not sweet¹.”

Mom usually is a sucker for croissants. In 2015, I took her to breakfast at Tartine Bakery when I lived in San Francisco, as she complained the entire time about how Costco's croissants were a fourth — no, a fifth — of the price of the croissants I just bought for her. She complained throughout our walk, a block north, then to the top of Mission Dolores Park, where we sat on some benches to look out into the neighborhood below. And then promptly SHUT THE HELL UP BECAUSE EVERYTHING WAS SO DAMN GOOD. No mea culpa, no walking back anything, just pure delicious silence as she devoured her croissant, and I, the last word.

I would not have that same victory today.

“How much did you buy? Nine croissants — no wonder you're going to be fat.” She picked the one half-covered with the neon green frosting and pistachio pieces and instinctively handed it to me.

“Mom, these croissants are supposed to be for you. To eat. Through the entire week.” Well, except for the frosted pistachio one I was eating.

“Well, I'm not hungry anymore. I drink coffee now. That keeps me full the whole day. After that, we can go grocery shopping."

Coffee does not, in fact, get her full for the whole day; it doesn't get her full at all. I know this because she's stopped taking her thyroid medicine — it upsets her stomach when she doesn't eat anything. She stopped taking Tylenol, too, for similar reasons.

Can you tell it's been a rough couple of days?

Mom insists we hit two grocery stores across Fremont: Marina Foods in Union City for the bulk of her items, Ranch 99 on Fremont Blvd for all of the things she can't get at Marina. “Oh, and Raley’s.”

“Raley’s,” I ask? Admittedly, I had hoped she’d say Whole Foods for the blog content.

"I'm out of water." Oh yeah, for the hot & cold water dispenser. The industrial-sized one they bought when they were still together, because, you know, AMERICA.

“Again,” I reiterate, “I could have just used the computer to handle all of this.”

I don't actually use the Chinese words for Instacart or DoorDash or whatever grocery app is popular right now. App names don't register for 89-year-old Chinese mothers, I have learned. I spent a year trying to get her to say the word "YouTube." After calling it "TooYoo" and me rolling my eyes or bursting into laughing fits too many times, we have both agreed "Video on her computer" was a totally acceptable way to call it.

"Too expensive," she says. Everything is too expensive.

“Okay, then I can just get it for you online.”

She looks at me incredulously. “How would you know what I'd want?”

Usually, I would respond to this something flippant with, “Oh, I don't know, MAYBE YOU WOULD TELL ME?” but honestly, I've conceded defeat a long time ago.

---

Marina Foods, Now with Instagram

The Marina Foods in Union City recently announced it would be a Hashi Market, but you'd have no indication otherwise. The sign out front still says Marina, the bags and staff are former Marina workers. The only difference as of this week is that the receipts now show we bought something at Hashi Market instead of Marina Foods. It's a Japanese grocery store with NYC origins and an Instagram feed.

You know any place like that is going to be pristine.

The former Marina Foods in Union City is... not that.

But it doesn't stop Mom. Or me, since I have to push the cart.

Mom spends at least twenty minutes on produce selection, another 20 in the frozen aisles, and then we back track multiple times in case she changes her mind. She loads her shopping cart with more frozen dumplings and pre-packaged Asian meals than I recall from our previous trips to Marina.

“Look at all these new brands,” she says, placing a frozen bag that has the words “SCALLION PORK PIE” in her cart. “Want to try one?" This turns out to be a rhetorical question as she places a box in the cart, and a beef one, presumably for her.

"This one too?" I hold up a box that says “jiajiangmian.” Mom made this for me all the time—just last week, as a matter of fact. I only recently learned that the only times she cooks is when I'm at home, because apparently, I needed more guilt in my life.

---

The KCA (Korean Coffee Apocalypse)

Next stop: Ranch 99 in Fremont, which is literally, like, a mile or two from Marina. The Ranch 99 has been around longer than Marina Foods, I think, but Ranch 99 is clearly the fancier store.

Because of the larger selection. And everything is more expensive. `

It's here where we look for her coffee. And it's here where her heart breaks.

Here's the thing about Asian moms and coffee that white people will never understand: we don't make coffee. We don't own coffee makers with their stupid timers and their “medium roast” and their seventeen different settings that all taste like burnt water anyway.

We grew up on instant coffee the same way we grew up on instant everything else—you tear open a packet, you add hot water, you stir. Done. It's the same principle as tea, except instead of a little paper bag, it's a little foil packet with writing you can't read, but somehow trust implicitly.

And somewhere along the way—I think it was during one of her Korean drama phases, because everything good in Mom's life comes from Korean dramas—she became absolutely obsessed with this one specific brand of Korean instant coffee. Not just any instant coffee. Not the stuff from Indonesia or Hong Kong or even the fancy Japanese ones that cost more than my car payment. It had to be Korean, with Korean writing on the package, and it had to cost exactly five times more than any reasonable human being should pay for powdered coffee.

These little packets became her crack. I'm not even being dramatic here. She would ration them. She would hide them in different places around the kitchen so she wouldn't run out too fast. She once asked me to bring back a suitcase full of them from a trip to LA's Koreatown, and I'm pretty sure she was more excited about the coffee than seeing me.

Which brings us to today, standing in the coffee aisle at Ranch 99, watching my mother's face crumple like someone just told her Santa Claus was a lie.

“They don't have it,” she says in that voice that means I'm about to spend the next hour driving to three different Asian markets.

I pick up a package from Indonesia. “What about this one? It's instant coffee.”

“No.”

"This one's from Hong Kong. Look, it has milk powder already in it."

“No.”

“Mom, this one literally says 'Korea' on it.”

She gives me a look that could wilt lettuce. “Wrong kind of Korea.”

It takes all my inner strength not to innocently ask, “YOU MEAN NORTH KOREA?!” But alas, she meant, "Wrong kind of Korean coffee brand."

And that's when I realize we're not shopping for coffee. We're on a rescue mission for the one thing that makes her morning routine bearable, the one constant in a world where everything else keeps changing, the one small luxury she's allowed herself that doesn't require explaining to anyone why it matters.

But Ranch 99 has betrayed her. They've discontinued her brand, probably because three people in all of Northern California actually bought it, one of them my mother, purchasing in bulk as if she were prepping for the apocalypse.

“Maybe we can find it online?” I suggest, already pulling out my phone.

She shakes her head. "It's not the same. I need to see the package. I need to make sure it's fresh."

Right. Because instant coffee goes bad. In packets. That are designed to last longer than cockroaches.

But I don’t say that because I learned a long time ago that this isn’t about coffee. This is about the small things that make her feel like the world still makes sense, even when everything else is falling apart.

So we leave Ranch 99 empty-handed, and I mentally prepare myself for a tour of every Asian grocery store in the Bay Area until we find her magic Korean coffee crack.

Because that's what good sons do. Even when it involves spending $33 on instant coffee that tastes exactly like every other instant coffee in the world.

Especially then.

---

Black Chips vs. Sugar-Crusted Os

By the time we swing by the Raley’s to fill up her empty 3-gallon bottles with water, I find myself hangry—because it's solidly early evening now.

Mom has exactly two reasons for going to Raley’s: the water refill station (because tap water apparently tastes like chemicals), and their fruit selection. She’s very serious about fruit. There was this one watermelon incident a few years back where she bought one from Marina, and it was completely unripe—a total tragedy that she still references whenever we pass the produce section. “See? Raley’s watermelons in summer are always good,” like Raley’s was the neighbor to provide safe harbor to the creep chasing me down the street when I was seven. This has somehow parlayed into her believing Raley's has superior everything-fruit-related, which, fine, whatever gets us in and out.

While she’s doing her fruit inspection ritual—tapping melons, squeezing peaches, having full conversations with the bags of Bing cherries—I wander off to grab some cereal. I’ve been on this Cinnamon Cheerios kick lately.

Don’t judge me; I’m 48, and it's been 575 days since I've had a job. Let me have my sugar-crusted Os.

Mom spots me with the cereal box. “What are you doing? That's TOO SWEET,” she says, in the tone of someone who used to pack me stir-fried bean curd and pork between two slices of Wonder Bread. You know, the kind of meal that made other kids trade away their Fruit Roll-Ups to avoid sitting near me at lunch.

But then—and this is where it gets good—we circle back around toward the checkout, and she stops at the chip aisle.

“Oh, I've been getting into this new snack lately,” she says, completely serious, like she's about to introduce me to some exotic Asian delicacy I've never heard of.

I'm thinking exotic-flavored peanuts, maybe some dried squid, possibly those wood ear mushrooms, or actual pig's ears.

She picks up a bag of Lay's barbecue chips.

REGULAR. ASS. LAY’S. BARBECUE. CHIPS.

“What is this?” I ask, staring at her.

Apparently, she tried them by accident—I have no idea how you accidentally try barbecue chips, but this is Mom we’re talking about—and she actually really liked the flavor. She doesn’t even call them Lay's barbecue chips. She calls them “the black chips,” which I think is hilarious and also perfectly describes her relationship with the visuals of American snack food branding and packaging.

I offer to show her the fancier options—kettle chips, those artisanal ones that cost eight dollars and taste like organic monks blessed them.

“No, no, no, no,” she waves me off. "Kettle chips too crunchy. Hurts my teeth."

So there we are: me getting lectured about sugar content while she stocks up on Lay’s like we’re nine years old heading to a ballpark.

I grab my Cinnamon Cheerios. She grabs her "black chips."

We are who we are.

---

Algorithms Can't Love You Back

Watching her inspect every fish, squeeze every tomato, and count exact change, I realize this isn't about groceries. It's about agency. For someone who grew up in food scarcity and raised a family of competing food sources, choosing her vegetables isn't inefficiency—it's proof she's still essential, still in control.

I could have used Safeway.com to get everything delivered in less time than it's taking now. But algorithms can't replicate the ritual of care, the deliberate choices, the small victories of finding the perfect ingredient at the right price.

When we get home and start unpacking, I notice she bought double of everything in produce—knowing I'd take some home. When I'm here, she cooks. When she's alone, she microwaves frozen things because she’s “not very hungry anyway.”

This is love, I realize, as I drive back to my condo from her house

Inefficient, stubborn, contradictory love.

That’s when mom calls. She finished the frozen noodles. “Those frozen noodles were terrible,” she says over the cellphone. “Never buy those again.”

1. Anyone who has read my blog over the years knows this, but whenever you see dialogue in italics, assume it's spoken in Mandarin.