The Egg Roll Lady Was an Economist

Miss Sue wasn’t running a restaurant.

She was making egg rolls in her kitchen and selling them out the back door of a housing project in Watts, California. No license. No storefront. No Yelp reviews. Just a woman who was good at something, knew her neighbors needed it, and decided that was enough to start.

Sanu grew up in the Nickerson Gardens — the largest housing project west of the Mississippi. And when Matteo asked him what it was really like, what the neighborhood actually felt like from the inside, he didn’t start with the violence. He started with Miss Sue.

“Her egg rolls were the bomb” he said. And he meant it as the highest possible compliment.

There’s a version of the Watts story that gets told over and over in the media and in policy papers and in documentaries about urban poverty. The gangs. The crack epidemic. The Rodney King insurrection. The triangulation of violence between the housing projects. The statistics.

Sanu knows that story. He lived inside it. He witnessed his first murder at seven years old. He lost a friend at thirteen in a place they shouldn’t have been. He watched people he grew up with get absorbed by gang culture and disappear into it.

But what he leads with — what he returns to when asked about his childhood — is not the violence. It’s the candy lady who set up shop in her living room selling goodies to the neighborhood kids. It’s Miss Sue and her egg rolls. It’s the butchers and the informal farmers markets where people who had migrated from agriculture-based communities brought that knowledge with them and fed the block with it.

This is not nostalgia. This is economics.

What Sanu is describing is what happens when a community is systematically cut off from institutional support — when factories close, when corporations move their labor overseas, when the formal economy has nothing left to offer the people in the Nickerson Gardens — and the people inside it build their own infrastructure anyway.

The candy lady is not a quaint detail. She is a market response to a market failure. She identified a need, acquired the goods, created a distribution point, and served her neighbors. That is entrepreneurship. That is community economics. That is the exact same logic that built every small business in every immigrant neighborhood in every city in America — the difference being that Miss Sue’s neighborhood never got the retrospective celebration.

Sanu went on to become an architect. A personal trainer. A student of African history and indigenous tradition and the way cities are designed and why certain communities are built to fail while others are built to thrive. He studies the vertical and horizontal dimensions of history — your family lineage running down through generations, the cultural and political forces running sideways through time — and he understands, with a precision that comes only from having lived inside the contradiction, how all of it intersects.

He says: what you’ve been through can help somebody else. That’s what we’re here for.

Miss Sue knew this before Sanu had words for it. She made egg rolls because she was good at making egg rolls and her neighbors were hungry. That’s the whole philosophy. You have a gift. Your community has a need. The distance between those two things is the business. The vocation. The calling.

The egg rolls were the bomb.

Build the thing you’re good at. Sell it out the back door if you have to.

Your community is waiting.

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