Riot Aftermath : One Grocery Was Saved by Homeless : Community: Residents of a tent city next door to Paul and Helen Chan’s market prevented the store from burning down.

The homeless men and women who live in a small tent city called the Village of Hope aren’t used to strangers looking them in the eye. When they do, what looks back is often distrust.

But Paul and Helen Chan, the couple who own the corner market next to their temporary encampment at 79th and Broadway, always seemed to smile, say hello, and give them food from time to time.

Last week, the homeless returned those small favors. When rioting broke out, they saved the Chans’ corner store from being torched. This week, they did even more--they saved the Chans from despair.

“We are so thankful,” said Helen Chan, 33, in tears, as she was surrounded by people whose names she was only beginning to learn. “I truly feel that the neighborhood people love us.”

In a city rife with racial animosity, the Village of Hope lived up to its name.

The small cluster of tents was set up just before Christmas by a grass-roots nonprofit group called Citizens for Community Improvements and run by William Glenn Swain, a Department of Water and Power employee. Its residents are black. Helen Chan is Vietnamese, and her husband is Chinese.

Shortly after the rioting broke out last Wednesday, Swain went next door to the corner market and advised the Chans to close early. Rioters were heading up Broadway. Rocks were being thrown. The Chans headed back to the Monterey Park home they share with their two small children.

That was when the worrying started. They had bought the store last year, and it represented a lifetime of work. For years, they had managed a tiny market miles away. He had held a second job as a sheet-metal worker to get a down payment. Then, last year, they got a Small Business Administration loan and bought what was then called Chin’s Market, a store with an unhappy history in which a former owner had been killed during a robbery.

Prices painted outside showed that the Chans avoided the price gouging that often occurs at inner-city markets. Eggs were $1.79 a flat, tomatoes two pounds for $1. “We were not trying to get rich, only to make a living,” Paul Chan said.

Hours after the Chans left, looters began making the rounds of local businesses. To the north, a major beauty supply store was looted and burned. The looters turned toward the Chans’ store. Unable to get in through the steel doors, they used fence poles to get in through the back, said Swain and his campers.

“It was crazy,” said Willie Giles, one of the homeless men. “There were hundreds of them, first some neighborhood people and then guys who drove in with trucks.”

Throughout the night, looters came and went, eventually trashing and emptying the inside of the store. From time to time, the campers would hear voices in the crowd talk about burning the place to destroy any evidence.

They couldn’t stop the looting hordes, but they were determined to not let the store burn.

Patiently, repeatedly, Swain and his crew pleaded with looters not to burn the store.

“We would explain to them that we were a camp, located next door to a store, and we didn’t want it burned,” Swain said. “They would say, ‘OK brother, we’ll leave.’ ”

True, the campers didn’t want a spark from the fire to ignite their tents. “But it just wasn’t right,” said one homeless woman who lives in the camp. “They (the Chans) are nice folks.”

At one point, a group of men in a truck urged the campers to join them in the looting. When the campers declined, the looters tossed a carton of beer over the fence. Every bottle broke.

“We just had to clean up the mess,” Swain said.

Late Thursday, Giles and Roy Edington, 43, smelled smoke and looked up to see a small black cloud rising from the back of the store. One started a hose brigade, and the other hailed a firetruck that was attending to a fire nearby. The fire in the Chans’ store was quenched within minutes and damage was minor.

Still, when the Chans returned on Friday, Helen Chan collapsed, heartsick.

The freshly shelved bread, the safe, the new electronic scale, the rows of chicken legs stacked just so, and the freezers of food--indeed, the freezers themselves--were all gone or ruined. Left behind on the floor amid the puddles left by fire hoses was a putrid, rotting stew.

“I feel so bad,” Helen Chan said Tuesday, “that I never want to come back here again, just walk away.”

But the men and the handful of women at the Village of Hope, to whom they had offered a friendly smile and an occasional loaf of bread, came through.

They offered to clean up the mess. On Tuesday, even as one neighbor picked crackers out of the smelly debris--”I’m not a looter, just a scavenger,” she explained--a crew of homeless men moved in to clean up the Chans’ market.