曼哈顿涅槃重生的小书店

实体书店哀鸿遍野的时候，有一个小小的书店Yu & Me Books，经历大火之后，在纽约闹市顽强地活下来。

今天在纽约时报读到这消息，不禁感慨，摘几段分享一下：

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll hear how a bookstore in Chinatown was brought back to life after a devastating fire. We’ll also meet the editor of a high school newspaper who became the subject of an article in the issue that came out last month.

Yu & Me Books was the first bookstore in Manhattan to be owned by an Asian American woman when it opened in December 2021. It was heavily damaged little more than 18 months later — on the Fourth of July last year — when fire destroyed an apartment upstairs in the same building in Chinatown.

By the time the fire trucks left, Yu was already thinking about what it would take to reopen the store, even though a thousand books had been ruined and she had lost $60,000 in inventory. My colleague Jordyn Holman followed Yu’s struggles after the fire. I asked Jordyn to explain how she came across the story and why she found it meaningful. Here’s what she said:

“My editor noticed Yu’s GoFundMe campaign and, knowing that I’m an avid book lover, suggested that I reach out to Lucy, as I came to call her.

“I cover the retail industry, which usually means writing about big companies that most people have heard of like Walmart and Macy’s. But retailing is also made up of millions of small businesses that dot our neighborhoods. I figured that following Lucy’s story would be a way to give readers insight into the mind-set of an entrepreneur who had been forced to rewrite her original business plan.

“In our first conversation, Lucy, a first-generation Chinese American who was then 28, told me that as a child she had dreamed of opening a bookstore. When she was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother would take her to Chinatown, where they could eat her mother’s favorite cuisine and speak Chinese. Lucy would also take art classes there. Her mother would wait in the car, in a CVS parking lot, and read — there were no bookstores for her to go.

“Lucy moved to New York in 2019 to work in supply-chain management. During the pandemic, like many of us, she started re-evaluating life and her goals — and revisited her childhood dream of a bookstore.

”Lucy found a 1,000-square-foot storefront on a block in Chinatown that included a laundromat and a dumpling restaurant. With the help of friends, she painted and built furniture to create a cozy living-room vibe. The store had a nook, a basement reading area and a bar.

“Yu & Me became a community gathering spot. Authors gave talks, and Lucy teamed up with other businesses in the neighborhood like Bahn by Lauren, selling their Vietnamese American and French pastries in her bookstore. It was a positive development for Chinatown, which was reeling from a string of anti-Asian attacks.

“Lucy wouldn’t let the fire be the end of the store’s story. It’s not just a story about one really determined businesswoman, but also about a community that rallied behind her. She was able to welcome customers back to Yu & Me in late January, in time for Lunar New Year, reopening the shop in a little more than half the time fire officials had expected it to take.

“These days, on any given afternoon, Yu & Me is brimming with people browsing the books on the shelves and tables, sitting on the bar stools or chatting with friends in the nook. Lucy has been thinking about the ways she can expand her reach. She has been applying for grants. But for now she has Yu & Me Books, a dream no longer deferred.”

记者James Barron