Jennifer Pham is doing whatever she can inside a local pharmacy to preserve her family’s deep roots in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
“We’re one of the first Asian businesses to open here on Argyle Street and it’s actually the first Vietnamese owned business here,” Pham told NBC Chicago.
She took over her family’s business Mini Tx Pharmacy years ago and said they’re doing more than just filing prescriptions but building a special community.
“I feel like this is not only our home,” she said. “We’re part of the make of Chicago.”
Her father immigrated to Chicago from Vietnam and first opened their doors in the eighties after seeing a need to help.
“What he would do is he would, translate the prescriptions into Vietnamese for the Vietnamese patients,” she said.
The pharmacy and medical center near Argyle and Winthrop also served as a mini mall back then.
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“We had a video rental shop, jewelry store. You can get your film developed here. You can get your karaoke systems,” she said. “It’s just a place where so many people can come for different things to learn about new music, new videos, and just a place for people to come together.”
Decades later an opportunity came knocking to sell to a corporate company. Pham believes that move would have change the face of her community.
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“I felt like if one person started to sell then another person can sell and I just didn’t want it go in that direction,” she said.
She now runs the pharmacy with Thoa Bui. The pharmacist and mother of two wanted to serve the community she grew up in.
“I’ve always wanted to come back and do something so when the opportunity came it was a no brainer,” Bui said. “I wanted to do this and also this area—it’s very underserved and I want to be able to bridge that gap.”
She says Argyle has changed over the years with neighbors moving out, new development, and businesses popping up.
“It’s changing a lot and we welcome the change,” Bui said. “But we also want to preserve the culture that this pharmacy brings to the neighborhood.”
The small pharmacy now trying to keep up with the times while working to never forget where they came from.
“I just really want this community to stay alive,” said Pham. “One of the beautiful things about Chicago is that we are so diverse in culture. You can go to different neighborhoods and you can be in it and it feels like you’re in different countries and to be able to still keep these ethnic enclaves alive it’s really important for the heart of Chicago to stay alive.”
