A chapter ends for a historic Asian American bookstore, but its story continues : NPR

The slim storefront on College Avenue that after housed Eastwind Books of Berkeley now sits empty. The bookshelves are gone, dusty shadows on the pale yellow partitions the one reminder of how tall they as soon as stood.

Co-owner Harvey Dong’s voice bounces off the partitions, as he remembers the titles that used to fill the store.

“The wall over there on the left, there was a piece with social actions, activism, LGBTQ research, additionally artwork books on origami, books on gardening, a faith part, philosophy part, Chinese language medication, martial arts,” he says.

For many years, this retailer was an anchor for the Bay Space’s Asian American neighborhood. Now, Harvey and his spouse Beatrice, the shop’s co-owner, have determined to shut the store. They’re each of their 70s and have growing old dad and mom to look after – and final weekend, they shut the doorways for the ultimate time.

Whereas they’re used to seeing this place filled with literature, Eastwind was by no means simply in regards to the books.

“Books are what make revolution,” Beatrice says, and the couple’s imaginative and prescient once they purchased the shop in 1996 was to develop a spot “that used books and studying and information to create unity, and to have the ability to deliver individuals increasingly more into the motion to alter the world.”

That revolutionary spirit grew from the couple’s childhood within the late Sixties, once they had been each preventing to advance the rights of Asian People. Harvey was a part of the Third World Liberation Entrance strike, a coalition of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American pupil teams that fought to ascertain an ethnic research program at UC Berkeley. Throughout the bay in San Francisco, they each protested for the housing rights of working class Chinese language and Filipino individuals in Manilatown.

It was there, in Manilatown, that Harvey and 9 others every threw in $50 to open a tiny store referred to as Everyone’s Bookstore. It was proper subsequent to Tino’s Barbershop, the place a band of aged Filipino males would jam on their archtop guitars. Harvey remembers listening to their music by means of the partitions, together with the sounds of Hawaiian music, drifting from the jukebox at close by Membership Mandalay.

“You’ll hear music, however then generally the music may cease and then you definately may hear wine bottles hitting the ground or one thing. After which there’s, like, a struggle outdoors,” he remembers with amusing.

Everyone’s Bookstore was one of many nation’s first Asian American bookstores, stocking literature from the Folks’s Republic of China, leftist papers, martial arts books and magazines from Hong Kong and Macau.

“We at all times felt uncomfortable once we went to mainstream bookstores,” Harvey says. “And also you’re searching for Asian American books and so they’re type of blended in with sociology or historical past.”

Jeffrey Thomas Leong, a author and poet who labored behind the counter at Everyone’s Books, says curious passersby would typically peek in, due to the rarity of such a retailer on the time.

“We noticed ourselves as making an attempt to supply a spot for an Asian American voice,” he says. “It was type of defining our personal area, making an attempt to supply the type of tales and literature that was remarkable earlier than.”

Leong says the novelty of the shop, and the political leanings of a few of the books and periodicals it stocked, additionally drew consideration from anti-Communist circles of the Chinese language American neighborhood.

“The bookstore was fairly radical as a result of it offered publications from mainland China,” Leong says. “So we needed to board up the home windows each night time simply to be sure that individuals did not, you recognize, [do] harm and vandalism and stuff like that.”

Everyone’s Bookstore endured for 10 years earlier than closing in 1980. However across the identical time, a brand new gathering place for Asian American literature emerged – a small chain referred to as Eastwind Books and Arts. For years, Harvey and Beatrice had been simply clients there. After which in 1996, they took over the Berkeley location.

“We had the boldness that we may give it a strive, no less than for a few years. However it ended up being 27,” Harvey says.

They envisioned Eastwind Books as a spot that will construct coalitions, not simply inside the Asian American neighborhood, however throughout every kind of marginalized teams – to assist political actions study from one another and make new connections.

Harvey remembers one occasion specifically, at which a gaggle of Southeast Asian refugee pupil activists met Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale. It was for the e-book Black In opposition to Empire: The Historical past and Politics of the Black Panther Celebration, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin.

“Not solely did Josh and I present up and the place was packed, however Bobby Seale was there,” Martin remembers, “and my reminiscence is that Bobby did a lot of the speaking. However the dialog ranged broadly.”

The refugee pupil group then invited Seale to talk at their very own occasions in regards to the Black expertise – an instance of the sorts of alliances Eastwind cultivated, Martin says. “Interested by individuals of shade politics, occupied with radical political coalitions, the bookstore and Bea and Harvey have been very, very important.”

“I believe the Asian neighborhood nonetheless has a methods to go so far as making alliances with different peoples of shade, different nationalities,” Harvey says. “It is vital to struggle for Asian American rights and struggle in opposition to violence in opposition to Asians. However it needs to be extra of a broader, complete of society method.”

Final week, because the Dongs ready to lock up store for the ultimate time, students, writers, clients and workers gathered at a UC Berkeley occasion to thank them for his or her many years of labor making a retailer whose affect transcended its partitions or the books upon its cabinets.

“It was a spot that embraced the facility of ethnic solidarity,” says the writer Janet Stickmon. “Eastwind Books was the one bookstore that at all times made it clear to me that on the planet of Asian American literature, there was a spot for me as a Blackapina writer.”

Dickson Lam, a professor of English at Contra Costa Faculty, says the shop was a refuge, a spot that linked him to his Asian American id in a approach that historical past classes by no means had.

“Rising up, I bear in mind academics speaking at school in regards to the railroad employees,” he says. “And although I am Chinese language, I by no means felt a connection to that as a result of that historical past felt so distant.”

Lam says Harvey and Beatrice’s struggle for Asian American rights within the Sixties and ’70s felt completely different. And he says they made him really feel like he had a spot in that historical past and one thing of his personal to contribute.

“With out Harvey and Bea needing to sit down me down to elucidate something, simply them being there, and the work that they did – it made me really feel Asian American. And it made me proud to be Asian American.”

Jaide Lin, a UC Berkeley pupil, says she hopes a brand new technology can “proceed to hold the torch” that Harvey and Beatrice held excessive.

“We’re not going to let issues cease right here,” Lin says. “And we will proceed making an attempt to open individuals’s eyes to the need of together with individuals’s tales that mirror one thing nearer to ourselves.”

On the closing occasion contained in the now-empty store, hosted by the native paper Berkeleyside, Beatrice spoke to that future – recalling the greater than 100 younger individuals who had labored on the store by means of the many years.

“We see our function as a springboard,” she says. “A few of our former workers are already volunteering to be the brand new face of our bookstore, they’re going to be those that can be organizing our occasions. So there is a vivid future.”

She reminded attendees that she and Harvey would proceed to curate the cabinets of their bookstore – on-line. And amid the various tributes and congratulations and remembrances, Harvey felt compelled to remind everybody that their story, and the story of Eastwind Books of Berkeley, wasn’t a eulogy.

“Right this moment shouldn’t be like a wake or a funeral, you recognize,” he laughs. “Nobody’s died, you recognize … this is sort of a starting.”