Eastwind Books, an anchor for the SF Bay Area's Asian community, shuts its doors
Eastwind Books, an anchor for the SF Bay Area's Asian community, shuts its doors
NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Harvey Dong about the closing of the Berkeley shop Eastwind Books, and the decades he and his wife and co-owner Beatrice spent promoting Asian-American authors.
Music from Tino's Barbershop Quartet in Action, used with permission from Curtis Choy and the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
We're going to take you now into a tiny bookstore in Berkeley, Calif. - a set of pale, yellow walls and chipped tile floors that has, for decades, anchored the Asian American community here.
Hello. Hello. Listen how echoey (ph) it sounds in here. Does it sound too echoey to you right now?
HARVEY DONG: Yeah. It is a little echoey...
CHANG: (Laughter).
DONG: Because...
CHANG: It's an empty room now. All the shelves are gone.
DONG: Right there, as soon as you come in the door, a person would greet the customers.
CHANG: Yesterday Eastwind Books of Berkeley closed its doors for the final time. The owners, Harvey Dong and his wife Beatrice, are now in their 70s. They've decided it was just time to close up shop.
DONG: On your right would be literature from China, Japan, Philippines, social movements, activism.
CHANG: They're so used to seeing this place packed with books. But, you know, Eastwind - it was never just about the books. It was an idea, one about convening community, which is exactly what happened at an event in Berkeley last week where scholars and writers Janet Stickmon, Dickson Lam and Keith Feldman shared their memories.
JANET STICKMON: Eastwind Books was the only bookstore that always made it clear to me there was a place for me as a Blackapina (ph) author.
DICKSON LAM: It made me feel Asian American. It made me proud to be Asian American. You know, I had something to contribute here, and, you know, this is my place, too.
KEITH FELDMAN: It's such a powerful reminder the bookstore has been not simply or solely as a container of something, but as a real catalyst for building the worlds we want to see.
CHANG: This idea to build a bookstore and, in doing so, to build a community - it started long before the Dongs ever owned this particular storefront in Berkeley. Their story goes back to the end of the 1960s, when Harvey and Beatrice joined a wave of student-led protests to establish an ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. Across the bay in San Francisco's Manilatown, they were also fighting for housing rights for working-class Chinese and Filipino people. And it was there in Manilatown that Harvey and nine friends each threw in $50 apiece to open a little shop called Everybody's Bookstore. It was right by Tino's Barber Shop, where a quartet of Filipino men often jammed on their guitars. Nearby was the ever-popular Club Mandalay.
DONG: You would hear music, but then sometimes you might - the music might stop, and then you might hear, like, wine bottles hitting the floor or something.
CHANG: Oops (laughter).
DONG: And there's just, like, a fight outside.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: Everybody's Bookstore was one of the country's first Asian American bookstores, stocking literature from the People's Republic of China, leftist papers and magazines from Hong Kong and Macau. Dong says the very idea of a store like this was radical at the time. There was always the threat of vandalism from anti-communist corners of the Chinese American community.
DONG: We had to put on the heavy plywood over the plate glass, so you might have, like, four locks holding the plywood down.
CHANG: Wow. Was that kind of a scary time?
DONG: It was something that we learned to deal with. Yeah.
CHANG: Yeah.
Everybody's Bookstore endured for 10 years before closing in 1980. But a new gathering place for Asian American literature emerged - a small chain called Eastwind Books & Arts. For years, Harvey and Beatrice were just customers there, and then, in 1996, they took over the Berkeley store. They envisioned Eastwind as a place that would build coalitions, not just within the Asian American community but across all kinds of marginalized groups so that movements could learn from each other. Harvey recalled this one event where a group of Southeast Asian refugee student organizers encountered Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panthers.
DONG: I remember from that one meeting - I think it was - the book was "Black Against Empire." At that meeting, the Southeast Asian student group was doing some labor organizing, and they wanted to invite Bobby Seale to go and speak about the Black experience. So they come here, they meet, they cheer, and then, all of a sudden, new connections are made. And then...
CHANG: Yeah.
DONG: ...I think the Asian American community still has a ways to go as far as making alliances with other peoples of color, other nationalities. It's important to fight for Asian American rights, but it has to be more of, like, a broader-whole-of-society approach.
CHANG: Well, when you first announced that this store, the brick-and-mortar version of the store, was closing, what was the initial response you got?
DONG: Some sadness, some people thanked us. There was a lady who came - she was an immigrant woman from, I think, Hong Kong or China - put her son in front of the store and took a picture of this little, two-foot-tall kid in front of the bookstore.
CHANG: How did that make you feel to watch that unfold?
DONG: Oh, I was touched by it because I was just kind of...
CHANG: They wanted the future...
DONG: Yeah.
CHANG: ...To remember this place.
DONG: Yeah, yeah.
CHANG: I mean, I want you to just sit with that, Harvey.
DONG: Yeah, it was - yeah. It was kind of hard to comprehend, let's say.
CHANG: Yeah.
DONG: You know, because it's something you do every day. You did it for 27 years. And finally, on the very last day, it all kind of comes to a certain point.
CHANG: Can I just say, Harvey - you and I have been talking this afternoon for quite some time, and I've been asking you a series of questions to get you to brag about this heroic role that you have played in the history of this community, in Asian American activism. And I feel - as we're talking, I feel your humility, your modesty and almost your resistance to taking too much credit. What am I feeling there?
DONG: Well, I'd say that my own experience and commitment has always been related to the idea that it's important to do that - you know? - important to share ideas about ethnicities or Asian American literature. Yeah, so it's nothing really to brag about.
(LAUGHTER)
DONG: I don't think, although I get...
CHANG: Just trying to get people to think and read and share.
DONG: Although I did get picked to toss the ball at the A's game...
CHANG: Nice.
DONG: ...For Asian Heritage Month.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: That's something to brag about.
Well, even if Harvey Dong won't brag, there are a lot of people who will do so on his behalf - people like Jaide Lin, a student at UC Berkeley who's been going to Eastwind for years.
JAIDE LIN: It was the first time that I've encountered a place where you didn't have to dig into every crevice and search in every corner to find ethnic literature. You finally find one. It's a travel brochure to Asia.
(LAUGHTER)
LIN: Check out the lanterns, you know? Like - and that was really beautiful for me. And I just want to say to Bea (ph) and Harvey that I hope that our younger generation can continue to carry the torch on this. And we're going to continue trying to open people's eyes to the necessity of including people's stories that reflect something closer to ourselves. So thank you so much.
(APPLAUSE)
CHANG: And as the stories of Eastwind pour in, Harvey Dong wants to remind people those stories - they aren't eulogies.
DONG: Today's not - it's not, like, a wake or a funeral.
(LAUGHTER)
DONG: No one's died, you know? But, in fact, I think you can put it as this is like a beginning, you know, because...
CHANG: In fact, Harvey and Beatrice say they will continue to curate the shelves of their bookstore but online. And they hope the spirit of Eastwind, this idea that there is power in community - that that will carry on.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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