MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump has changed what he's saying about the tariffs he put in place against China, suggesting they might come down from 145% - but as of now, they are still enforced. Now, a lot of different kinds of businesses have been affected by this trade war, but businesses in Chinatowns have been hit especially hard since many of them rely on Chinese imports. Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman from member station KQED brings us the view from San Francisco's Chinatown.
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AZUL DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN, BYLINE: By all appearances, it's a normal day here in Chinatown. Street performers busk for tips, tour guides lead groups through the narrow, brick-lined alleyways, and Bay Area locals get their grocery shopping done.
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DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: Daniel Young lives in Antioch and comes here to buy Chinese products he can't get anywhere else.
DANIEL YOUNG: Today, I bought some chips and a whole bunch of fortune cookies. Yeah, I even got a giant one for my daughter for her birthday.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: He says he's noticed that some items are more expensive than they used to be. He chalks that up to the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.
YOUNG: It's kind of like trying to start a war, you know? I don't understand why he would want to do that only to China.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: Mei Zhu owns the store where Young was shopping. She says the vast majority of her products are imported from China - soy sauce, dry noodles, candies and cookies. According to Zhu, wholesalers have absorbed some of the price hikes, so she's only had to raise her prices by around 50%. But other items now cost a full 145% more - so she's stopped stocking them.
MEI ZHU: (Non-English language spoken).
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: It is extremely significant, she says. The higher prices are driving customers away and sales are down 30%.
ZHU: (Non-English language spoken).
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: She says it's already impossible to continue, and if the tariffs stay in place, she'll close her business. Down the street at Tung Fung Hai Wei Chinese Herbal (ph), Sam Liang presides over a store full of things like Goji berries and ginseng and other products used in traditional Chinese medicine.
SAM LIANG: (Non-English language spoken).
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: He says you can get some of these things outside of China, but they may not be exactly what his Chinese customers want - and he's worried the increase in prices will put them out of reach for his customers. These Chinatown businesses are facing an existential threat, according to Malcolm Yeung.
MALCOLM YEUNG: This has always been a community built around trade.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: He's the executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. He says for over a century, Chinese immigrants here have leveraged their connections back in China to build successful businesses and achieve their American dream. The tariffs are changing that.
YEUNG: You're basically just sending the signal, like, that's off. That's done.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: He says San Francisco's Chinatown has been around since the 1800s and has withstood all kinds of hardship - the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1906 earthquake, and more recently, COVID and a local increase of anti-Asian hate crimes. Still, with this particular challenge, he says there's an emerging sense of powerlessness.
YEUNG: That these things are being done to us and that there's nothing, you know, we can do as a community to push back or fight back but just to simply react.
DAHLSTROM-ECKMAN: He expects that other Chinatowns across the country will be experiencing the same kind of economic upheaval. Price hikes are also being reported in Chinatowns in New York, Philadelphia and Honolulu.
For NPR News, I'm Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman in San Francisco.
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