When Phong Duc Yen opened a Chinese grocery store on San Francisco’s San Bruno Avenue in 1991, selling chicken feet, bean sauce and bok choy might have seemed like a risk.
The street was flanked on one side by the Portola neighborhood, which was mostly Black and white, and on the other by the majority Black Bayview-Hunters Point.
But Yen, an ethnically Chinese refugee from Vietnam, saw an opportunity, later opening a Chinese herb shop and the area’s first Chinese restaurant with his wife, Lien…