A few days ago I read an article called “A Close Look at America’s Old-Money Chinese Families,” which dug all the way to the bottom of dynasties like the Pei family (I.M. Pei), the Chao family (Elaine Chao), and the Wang family (An Wang). Fascinating read — but also a bit of a letdown, because these families feel a million miles away from ordinary people like us. A Chinese person in North America can go their entire life without meeting a single Pei or Chao. But there are two signs everyone recognizes: America’s 99 Ranch and Canada’s T&T — the places where homesickness gets treated. Most people, though, have no idea who’s actually behind these two chains, or what connects them. And almost nobody knows that tucked away in Vancouver is a Chinese family that quietly built a fortune through retail over an entire century, without anyone noticing. This piece digs into all three. The ending gets a little sentimental — bear with me.
I. 99 Ranch: A Taiwanese Agriculture Major Opens North America’s Biggest Chinese Supermarket, in Little Saigon Link to heading
Let’s start with the chain North Americans know best: 99 Ranch Market, known in Chinese as Da Hua (大华) — “Great China.”
The founder, Roger Chen, was Taiwanese, a graduate of National Taiwan University’s agricultural economics program. An agriculture major who ended up selling vegetables to the entire United States — when you think about it, that checks out perfectly.
In 1984, Roger Chen opened his first store in Westminster, Southern California. The funny part: this wasn’t a Chinese neighborhood at all — it was Little Saigon, a Vietnamese enclave. The first store was originally called “99 Price Market,” which sounded suspiciously like a dollar store. It later got rebranded to “99 Ranch Market” for a touch more class. Why 99? In Chinese, 9 sounds like “jiǔ” (久), meaning “long-lasting,” so 99 means “long, long-lasting.” One number, and the entire Chinese obsession with generational endurance is written right on its face. The parent company was named Tawa — literally “Great [Chinese] Nation.”
The “99 Ranch Market” branding as we know it today didn’t officially appear until around 1988, in Rowland Heights on the east side of Los Angeles. Roger Chen convinced a group of Taiwanese investors to build an entire commercial complex from scratch: a 36,000-square-foot supermarket, ringed by restaurants and shops. That single move defined the standard template for Chinese shopping plazas across North America for decades to come — a 99 Ranch anchor store bringing an entire Chinese-owned plaza to life. Walk into pretty much any Chinese commercial building in California today, and nine times out of ten, 99 Ranch is sitting right at the center. It’s long since stopped selling just groceries — it’s selling an entire overseas-Chinese lifestyle.
What follows is a textbook immigrant success story: from one store in California, to blanketing Southern California, to slowly crawling up into Northern California, Nevada, Washington, Texas… eventually becoming the largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States. Roger Chen built his early business importing goods from Taiwan, catering specifically to Mandarin-speaking customers; parent company Tawa later launched a smaller, more Taiwan-flavored sibling brand called “168 Market” (168 — another lucky number). Today, 99 Ranch has about 58 stores across 11 states. Wherever there’s one nearby, the local Chinese community has an anchor — running low on soy sauce, craving proper greens, need frozen dumplings for New Year’s — the first instinct is always “let’s go to 99 Ranch.”
Worth pausing here on the observation from “Old-Money Chinese Families” that stuck with me most: early Chinese exclusion laws boxed Chinese immigrants into exactly four industries — retail, restaurants, laundry, and trade — because these four required low startup capital, minimal English, and were things white society simply looked down on. The Chinese supermarket is precisely the modern, still-living descendant of that “retail” lineage, which has survived a full century. When we push a shopping cart through a Chinese supermarket today, we’re technically still walking down a narrow lane that the law forced open — just one that generations of people have since widened and lit up.
So far this sounds like a triumphant success story. But sit with these two numbers for a second: first store opened in 1984, and forty years later, there are only 58 stores across the entire United States. And these same forty years happen to coincide exactly with an explosion in the Asian American population. The demand was there. The moat was there. And yet 99 Ranch just kept plodding along, opening stores one at a time, unhurried.
Outside of California, it was essentially franchise-only for years — the first company-owned store outside California didn’t open until 1998, in Seattle. Real expansion toward the East Coast and Texas didn’t happen until after 2008. This isn’t a capability problem. It’s a personality problem — and it’s the single most characteristic “personality” of Chinese family businesses.
99 Ranch is a thoroughly private family company: no public listing, no outside financing, no fanfare. Roger Chen and the two children who succeeded him — son Jonson, who handles expansion and serves as chairman; daughter Alice, who runs day-to-day operations as CEO — talk about the business in every interview and never about themselves, so low-profile that outsiders can’t even say for sure what they look like. Dad built his career serving Mandarin speakers and importing from Taiwan; this generation has spread the shelves to “pan-Asian” and gone global with sourcing, pushing into the East Coast and Texas — a real step on the gas pedal. But the underlying instinct — steady, cautious, never releasing the hawk until you actually see the rabbit — is written into the family’s DNA.
Caution has its rewards, of course: forty years without collapsing, without being acquired, without a single scandal — that’s an achievement in its own right. But keep this “slowness” in mind, because it’s about to be thrown into sharp relief by a completely opposite choice in the next story.
II. T&T: A Name Stitched Together From Two Backers, Eventually Sold to the Outsiders Link to heading
Turn the camera to Canada. The supermarket every Canadian Chinese person knows best isn’t 99 Ranch — it’s T&T (大统华, Dà Tǒng Huá). In Vancouver and Toronto, T&T is basically the water, electricity, and gas of Chinese daily life. What most people don’t know: 99 Ranch and T&T are, in a sense, in-laws.
T&T’s founder, Cindy Lee, is a more inspiring character than most TV dramas. Born in Taiwan, one of eight children. She immigrated to Vancouver in 1976 barely speaking English, with hearing trouble in one ear. Her first job was bookkeeping at $5 an hour; to break into an accounting firm and build up experience, she even offered to work for free at first. Her husband Jack initially worked for a meat wholesaler; the two of them later started a small Asian food wholesale business near Chinatown.
The idea for T&T came from an extremely mundane moment. On a rainy day, her daughter was begging to go shopping at Safeway, and Cindy offhandedly said, “Safeway doesn’t have anything we actually want to buy.” That single sentence planted the seed: why couldn’t there be a supermarket as clean and bright as a Western one, but stocked with everything Chinese families love to eat?
The timing lined up perfectly — Taiwanese food conglomerate Uni-President (yes, the instant noodle company that also runs 7-Eleven in Taiwan) happened to be scouting opportunities in Canada. The two sides clicked immediately. In 1993, Cindy Lee opened the first T&T store in Burnaby, just outside Vancouver.
This store wasn’t funded by her alone — three backers stood behind it: the Lee couple themselves, Taiwan’s Uni-President, and — here’s the twist — Tawa, the very same parent company behind America’s 99 Ranch. In other words, 99 Ranch in America was one of the founding shareholders of T&T in Canada. Two storefronts, one shared root.
This “shared root” is stitched, quite literally, right into the name — and I think it’s the single most delightful detail in the whole story. The English name T&T comes from the initials of her two daughters, Tina and Tiffany. And the Chinese name, 大统华, by her own account: “大” (Da) from Tawa (大华), “统” (Tong) from Uni-President (统一), and “华” (Hua) meaning Chinese. A supermarket sign turned into a miniature cap table, stitching two financial backers and an entire ethnicity into three characters.
But starting a business is never a dinner party. After the first two stores opened, foot traffic was genuinely strong — but the money genuinely wasn’t. Cindy admitted she had zero experience managing a large supermarket at the time, and the company’s cash on hand was only enough to survive a few more months. T&T nearly died in the crib. She gritted her teeth and pulled through, and what followed was a nationwide chain.
T&T went on to become Canada’s largest Asian supermarket chain. But the story took a sharp turn in 2009: Loblaw — Canada’s retail behemoth (yes, the same one that recently had to pay out $50 in bread vouchers over a price-fixing scandal for just filling out an email form) — acquired T&T for CAD 225 million, comprising CAD 191 million in cash and CAD 34 million in preferred shares.
One often-overlooked detail: the Lee family didn’t cash out entirely and walk away — though accounts differ on exactly how much equity they retained. This wasn’t a simple “sell and disappear” exit; T&T continued to be run by the Lee family.
The succession chapter is even more interesting. Cindy’s daughter, Tina Lee, has a textbook-perfect résumé: undergrad at the Ivey Business School at Western University, an MBA from UCLA, followed by strategy consulting at Deloitte in Los Angeles. On paper, dramatically more polished than her mother, the former $5-an-hour bookkeeper. And yet, when Cindy turned 65 and prepared to retire, she didn’t simply hand the CEO title to her daughter — she actually tried, at one point, to talk Tina out of taking over — probably because she understood exactly how brutal this business is, and didn’t want her daughter jumping into that fire.
Tina eventually took the CEO seat in 2014 anyway. But note the key difference: by this point, Tina wasn’t “the boss’s daughter” anymore — she was a professional executive working for Loblaw, a publicly traded company owned by outsiders.
Loblaw, of course, wasn’t naive. The CAD 225 million it paid for wasn’t just shelf space in a few dozen stores — it was buying the weight that three characters, 大统华, carried in the hearts of Chinese Canadians. And that brand was valuable precisely because it had been built, brick by brick, by Chinese hands. So after the acquisition, Loblaw was smart enough to change essentially nothing, letting T&T keep living as a “Chinese supermarket” in the public eye. There’s a bit of dark comedy in that: the entity that best understood the value of this Chinese brand ended up being a white-owned conglomerate.
What happened next is even more interesting. Instead of fading into irrelevance after the acquisition, T&T actually expanded more aggressively than it ever had while independently owned. Today it has 37 stores in Canada, and by the end of 2024 it had pushed into the United States — its first US flagship opened in Bellevue, just outside Seattle, followed by a Lynnwood location in 2025, with California reportedly next. What’s especially notable: T&T absorbed the clean, spacious aesthetic of Western supermarkets and gradually shed the “lower-tier” feel of traditional Chinese grocery stores. Plenty of friends in the US, comparing the two, have started looking at old-school 99 Ranch a little less fondly.
This is a remarkably thought-provoking ending. Purely in terms of wealth, the Lee family is an unambiguous winner: built from nothing to become the national leader, then sold cleanly at the top of the market to an industry giant, money safely banked, and the next generation still gets to sit in the C-suite. This is the “perfect exit” every founder dreams of.
But from the “family” angle, T&T is no longer a Chinese family business. It has become a Loblaw subsidiary that “happens to be called T&T” and “happens to sell Chinese groceries.” This maps precisely onto the sobering conclusion that “Old-Money Chinese Families” kept returning to: you think you’re passing down a family — but really, you’re just selling an asset. The money was earned by Chinese hands; but the house is no longer entirely a Chinese house.
III. The Louie Family: From a $50 Head Tax Receipt to a Century as Vancouver’s Invisible Wealthiest Family Link to heading
If 99 Ranch is “held on tight but moved slow,” and T&T is “made the money but sold the control,” then the Chinese family that has taken “holding on” to its absolute extreme is hiding in Vancouver, surnamed Louie. Almost nobody has heard of this family — but its business is far bigger than either of the other two.
The story starts with a head tax receipt.
Everyone knows about America’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Fewer people know that Canada’s version of exclusion was even worse. Starting in 1885, Canada levied a “head tax” on every Chinese immigrant entering the country: CAD 50 to start, raised to CAD 100 in 1900, and rocketed to CAD 500 in 1903 — roughly two years’ wages for a Chinese laborer. A toll collected specifically from one ethnicity, and shameless about it in a way that’s genuinely rare in history. Between 1885 and 1923, roughly 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid this tax. Then in 1923, Canada went further and passed the Chinese Immigration Act — known to history as the Chinese Exclusion Act — which essentially banned Chinese immigration outright for 24 years, until its repeal in 1947. And the date this law took effect happened to be July 1st — Canada’s national holiday. For years afterward, Chinese Canadians referred to every July 1st as “Humiliation Day,” staying home and refusing to celebrate.
Keep that backdrop in mind, because it’s the only way to properly weigh what the Louie family accomplished.
Generation One — Hok Yat Louie: Borrowing $50 to Land, Building Roots Through the Grocery Trade
The family’s founding patriarch was Hok Yat Louie (1875–1934), born into a poor farming family in Zhongshan (formerly Xiangshan), Guangdong. In 1896, at 21, he crossed the ocean to Canada. He borrowed $50 to pay the head tax — the single best investment of his entire life, because seven years later, in 1903, that same tax had jumped tenfold to $500. Arriving seven years earlier could have changed everything about his fate. That’s the kind of narrow crack history leaves for ordinary people: those who squeezed through survived; those a step slower were shut out entirely.
After landing, he did every kind of manual labor imaginable, eventually leasing land on what is today Marine Drive in Burnaby to grow vegetables, relying on farming skills brought straight from his home village. In 1903, he opened his first small shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown, under the name “Kwong Chong” — selling seeds, fertilizer, and wholesale groceries. Farming and retail — the entire hundred-year root system of the Louie family was planted right there, in that one small shop.
By 1911 business had grown enough to move into a large warehouse on East Georgia Street; in 1927 the company was formally incorporated as H.Y. Louie Co. Ltd.
One detail here says everything about the man’s character: once he’d made it, he personally covered the head tax for many newly arrived countrymen who couldn’t afford it, letting them stay and survive. At a moment when a nation had literally priced its contempt for his people into law, he chose to pay out of his own pocket to pull his countrymen through the gap, one at a time.
Hok Yat Louie died in 1934, leaving behind four sons and a wholesale grocery shop. The story had only just begun.
Generation Two — Tong Louie: The Quiet Titan
The man who turned a Chinatown shop into a business empire was the eldest son, Tong Louie (1914–1998). After taking over, Tong made one crucial pivot: shift the business from retail toward wholesale, then use wholesale cash flow to buy up retail franchise rights.
In 1955, he secured the BC franchise rights for the IGA supermarket chain. In 1968, when Canadian retail giant Dominion pulled out of BC, he calmly scooped up the nine stores it left behind. In 1976, he acquired the well-known local drugstore chain London Drugs.
The London Drugs acquisition is my favorite anecdote in the entire Louie saga. This USD 9 million deal was reportedly sealed with a handshake in under 30 minutes. A Chinese man once formally opposed by 23 signature-bearing neighbors shook hands once, and within half an hour, walked away owning a chain that would eventually grow to 81 stores. Real heavyweights never need a roomful of lawyers and an 800-page contract to close a deal.
IGA and London Drugs are today two of the most recognizable retail names in Western Canada. Yet the overwhelming majority of Canadians — including people who shop at these stores every single day — have no idea their owner is a Chinese family. That’s precisely the title of Tong Louie’s biography: Tong: The Story of Tong Louie, Vancouver’s Quiet Titan. Author E.G. Perrault described this “quietness” as almost a distinctly Chinese trait: getting things done without fanfare, wealthy enough to rival a province’s economy while remaining someone outsiders couldn’t even name.
But “quiet” doesn’t mean he was never targeted. In 1941, before his wedding, Tong Louie bought a house in a white, middle-class neighborhood on Vancouver’s west side — one of the first Chinese families to move out of Chinatown. In response, 23 neighbors signed a joint petition to city hall demanding the “Oriental invasion” of their quality neighborhood be stopped. The Louie family’s success grew, inch by inch, directly out of that humiliation.
Generation Three — Brandt Louie: Turning the Family Business Into BC’s Second-Largest Private Company
The next generation was led by grandson Brandt Louie (b. 1943). A trained chartered accountant, he returned to take over the family business in 1972. Under his leadership, the Louie enterprise fully modernized.
Today, the H.Y. Louie Group is the second-largest private company in all of British Columbia, with annual revenue of roughly USD 4.2 billion — second only to the empire of BC’s richest man, Jim Pattison (whose name, unlike the Louies’, you’ll see plastered everywhere across the province). London Drugs now has 81 stores across Western Canada; the group’s Georgia Main Food Group operates 22 IGA supermarkets, 7 Fresh St. Market stores, and a newly opened Asian supermarket; the whole group employs over 8,000 people. Brandt Louie himself is a Forbes-certified billionaire, worth several billion dollars.
Even more remarkable: this family has stayed rich for a full century across four generations — bucking the old saying that wealth rarely survives past the third. Brandt Louie served a six-year term as Chancellor of Simon Fraser University, was awarded the Order of Canada in 2024, and the family’s Tong and Geraldine Louie Family Foundation donates to 50 to 75 charities a year, focused on healthcare, education, the arts, and anti-racism work. BC’s Chinese Canadian Museum even ran an exhibition dedicated to the family, with a title that couldn’t be more fitting: “Seeds to Success.”
The fourth generation is already on the field, and the pattern is intriguing. Brandt Louie’s two sons currently serve as co-presidents of H.Y. Louie: Gregory, a practicing radiologist by training, now oversees the family’s newly expanded healthcare clinic business; Stuart, a lawyer, serves as legal counsel across the group’s business lines. (A fun aside: when Meng Wanzhou was released on bail years ago by a mysterious Chinese-Canadian man surnamed Louie, I couldn’t help wondering…) This also echoes an observation from “Old-Money Chinese Families”: first-generation Chinese wealth builders push their children with everything they have into the most elite professional educations — and the kids, after a scenic detour through medicine and law, usually end up coming right back to run the family business anyway.
From a $50 head tax receipt to a century-old family fortune that rivals an entire province’s economy — this might be the single hardest-earned success story a Chinese family has ever written in North America.
IV. Three Stories, One Mirror: What Chinese Immigrants Held Onto in a Foreign Land Link to heading
So, three stories told. Put them side by side, and you realize they’re actually three different answers to the same question.
99 Ranch is “held on tight, but moved slow.” Forty years, 58 stores — cautious to the point of near-paralysis. It carries the full spectrum of a Chinese family business’s virtues and flaws at once: steady, low-key, never overreaching, keeping every store lean. The upside is survival. The downside is missing out on a much bigger world it could have claimed. The second generation just took over and is still working to make up for lost time.
T&T is “made the money, but sold the control.” The founding story is close to perfect, the exit was clean and elegant, and the daughter still holds the CEO title — leaving the family with at least a root in the ground. But ultimate decision-making power has passed to a white-owned conglomerate. The family no longer fully owns the name it once stitched, by hand, into its own storefront sign.
The Louie family is the only one that truly “held on.” A century, four generations, wealth rivaling an entire province. But look closer, and something paradoxical emerges: of the three, the Louies have held onto their wealth and family the most successfully — and are, arguably, the least “Chinese” of them all. Their most lucrative businesses — IGA, London Drugs — are thoroughly mainstream, white-market businesses with zero connection to “Chinese supermarket” identity. Starting with Tong Louie, the family actively moved out of Chinatown and into white neighborhoods (even in the face of a 23-neighbor petition against them); by the third generation, Brandt Louie was serving as SFU chancellor and receiving the Order of Canada — by any measure, a genuine member of Vancouver’s mainstream upper class.
This confirms, precisely, the sharpest conclusion from “Old-Money Chinese Families”: an immigrant family that survives multiple generations intact often does so because it locked in class status — at the cost of its ethnic identity. The Louie family held onto everything a family is supposed to hold onto. The one thing that slowly, quietly dissolved across a century and four generations was the “Chineseness” that once crossed an ocean from a farming village in Zhongshan, on the back of a borrowed $50 head tax. This isn’t a failing unique to the Louies — it’s the fate baked into every overseas Chinese family’s story.
Closing Link to heading
For a new generation of Chinese immigrants, it feels perfectly natural to stand in a bright, spotless supermarket, casually picking between eight brands of soy sauce and thirty kinds of leafy greens — so natural that we never stop to ask how many years, and how much humiliation, it took to build that shelf.
Behind every one of these signs is a Taiwanese agriculture student opening his first store in Little Saigon. A couple stitching their daughter’s name together with their financiers’ names into a storefront sign. A farmer from Zhongshan borrowing $50 to pay a head tax. And a petition, signed by 23 neighbors, demanding that he never be allowed to stay.