If you’re looking for pork, Ted Li’s got you covered. He carries pork ribs, pork liver, pork belly, pork feet, pork legs, pork stomach, and if you’re really adventurous, pork rectum. Li, fifty-four, opened the Way 1 Super Market in mid-June in the Plymouth Road Mall in the former Bella Vino space. It’s quite a step up for Li, who had owned the smaller Dong Yu China Market inside the mall for eighteen years. “Basically,” Li says, “we moved the old store from the other location.”

He also quadrupled the store’s size. Dong Yu was about 5,000 square feet, and the new place is closer to 20,000. The move allowed Li to go from running a small ethnic grocery to a full-fledged supermarket selling goods from all over the world. The emphasis is definitely still on Asian items–even the bulk peanuts are labeled in Chinese characters–but next to things like toothpaste from China you’ll also find American brands like Colgate and Pepsodent. With meat, seafood, fresh fruit, and produce, Way I is definitely a modern supermarket.

Li, who moved to Ann Arbor from China twenty years ago, never planned to go into the grocery business. In China he went to medical school to become an orthopedic surgeon, and he’s also trained in traditional Chinese medicine like acupuncture. While studying for his boards in this country, he took a number of jobs at the U-M Medical Center doing medical research. But he decided to put off taking the boards when he realized he’d have to drag his daughter out of school and move his family to whatever residency program in the country would take him.

Now that his daughter is grown and a college grad, he says he might go back and take those boards one day. And once he finds a good manager, “maybe I can find more time to do something else.”

Li says he has decided to adopt the new name so people wouldn’t assume the store was simply an Asian market. He says “Way 1” suggests good will, and the “number one way” to have a wide variety of merchandise. Whether because of its new name or its greater visibility, the new store does seem to be drawing a more diverse clientele. Li says most of the customers at the old store were Asian. At the new store, he’s getting a lot more non-Asian customers.

Way 1 Super Market, Plymouth Road Mall, 2789 Plymouth Rd., 669-8821. Sun.-Thurs. 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 10 a.m.-10 p.m.