It's windy and spitting rain, and the hungry line up by the hundreds, squeezing single file into a trailer to snag enough food for a few days.

There, as usual, the line at the King Street food bank run by Seattle's Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) funnels past Vai Faleagafulu. For 90 minutes, the 41-year-old volunteer offers up double fistfuls of fresh vegetables, which customers stuff eagerly into plastic bags or pile inside tattered rolling suitcases.

She's a welcoming presence on a dreary day, full of happy chatter dished out with an easy grin. Several times she cracks open a Brussels sprout, trying to convince hungry skeptics that it's a veggie worth grabbing.

"Do you like cabbage? It's kind of like cabbage," she tells one elderly woman, who wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. "Smell. Take some and try it. You might like it."

Faleagafulu knows intimately how important it is to help people in line feel comfortable here. That's because she's not just a volunteer.

Faleagafulu is a customer, too.

"I don't know where I'd be without this place," she confides later, when she has a minute to sit. Her voice is almost a whisper. "They really helped me out. This was my last hope."

Faleagafulu has been coming here for at least five years, after parting with her employer, a commercial baking company that since has gone out of business. She'd had experience with a temp service and as a commercial fisherman but struggled to find work that paid enough to cover child care.

There were evictions and a move in with her mother, who manages a motel on Pacific Highway, a job that keeps her scrambling seven days a week. With three kids (now four), Faleagafulu found there just never seemed to be enough of anything.

Her twin teenage daughters were ashamed to bring friends home. Faleagafulu had no cash to pay for school pictures.

"I was scared," she said. "There were nights and days when I didn't know where we'd get enough food."

Then she learned about the tiny trailer in the Chinatown International District just beneath Interstate 5 on King Street, run by ACRS, an all-purpose social-service organization that offers assistance to King County's Asian and Pacific Island communities.

ACRS helps immigrants, refugees and American-born residents with mental-health, substance-abuse, gambling and domestic-violence counseling. It offers cultural activities and meals to children and seniors and job placement and family resources for people of all ages. It provides 13 programs to residents who combined speak more than 40 languages and dialects.

"A client can come in the door and sit down with a case manager who can help figure out what kind of services are needed," ACRS spokeswoman Joyce Zhou said.

And every Wednesday and Friday, homeless people, seniors on fixed income and others in need stock up for free on everything from tempura and green beans to rice, lettuce, noodles and tofu. With one full-time and two part-time employees, and major food donations from Food Lifeline and Northwest Harvest (as well as from neighborhood markets like Lam's Seafood and Uwajimaya), the ACRS food bank feeds 400 customers each day. More than 5,000 families are served each year.

Faleagafulu, like most, came for the food. But she kept coming back, twice a week on and off, year after year, volunteering her time in return for free groceries.

"She's always so pleasant and has this really nice smile and really big heart and tries to accommodate everyone the best she can," said Karen Jackel, the food-bank coordinator. "People coming here are already down and out or sometimes depressed. They don't want to feel embarrassed and ashamed. For some of our older clients, it's the only time they get out all week. Vai goes out of her way to make everyone feel good."

Jackel recalled that the week before Thanksgiving, an agitated homeless man outside the food bank began shouting that he wanted long-sleeve shirts. Faleagafulu quietly disappeared and came back moments later with three or four.

"That's Vai," Jackel said. "He wanted long-sleeve shirts. So she went and got long-sleeve shirts. I don't know where she got them or anything."

Faleagafulu likes the way volunteering makes her feel — she likes seeing what a difference it can make. She sometimes brings her teenage girls to help out. Her 3-year-old son sometimes passes out onions.

"I want them to see what it means to help someone," Faleagafulu said.

She and her fiancé now run a small business, hauling old cars to the scrap yard for cash. She still sometimes turns to the food bank to put meals on the table, but she no longer feels worried or ashamed. In fact, she actually feels blessed.

For that, she thanks not just the food bank, but the time she's put in helping others.

"There's so much more joy when we sit down to eat," she said.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093

or cwelch@seattletimes.com.

On Twitter @craigawelch.