End of an era, I've stopped by when I visited the Asian Ghetto in Berzerkeley

[theking]

‘A culture, a people, an ethos’: one of the US’s oldest Asian American bookstores closes

As Eastwind Books of Berkeley shutters in California, local residents mourn the loss of a community


The author Hua Hsu remembers going to Eastwind Books of Berkeley as a kid. His parents would drive 50 miles north from their home in Cupertino to the small shop near the Berkeley campus. There, his parents, Taiwanese immigrants, would buy books and newspapers from Asia that they couldn’t find elsewhere in the Bay Area.

Later, when Hsu – now a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning memoir Stay True – was in college at the University of California, Berkeley, he developed his own relationship with the store, mostly as a place where ethnic studies and Asian American studies professors had students buy their books for class.

“The more time I spent there, the more I realized it was also a community,” Hsu said in an email to the Guardian. “You would bump into people from class, not just students, but instructors, movement figures you’d read about in books, people you saw in documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Eastwind, one of the oldest Asian American bookstores in the US, was a pillar of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Asian American community for more than four decades – first selling books and periodicals from Asia, and later stocking mostly Asian American authors. Eastwind’s offerings included popular titles, as well as lesser-known works on local Asian American history, poetry, ethnic studies, literature, cookbooks and graphic novels.

In April, owners Harvey Dong and Beatrice “Bea” Dong announced the store’s closure, citing the rising costs of business and the need to take care of elderly parents.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, said in an email that losing Eastwind is about more than a bookstore. “Storefronts occupy physical space, and in the case of ethnically and politically specific businesses, they make visible the presence of a culture, a people, an ethos,” said Nguyen, whose Bay Area book events would sometimes include sales by Eastwind. “With its disappearance, we lose not just a business, but some of our visibility as well.”

Eastwind opened in 1982, with two locations in Berkeley and San Francisco, initially under the ownership of a Hong Kong-based company. During its first 13 years, it primarily sold books from Asia: Chinese language books, and volumes about Chinese medicine and martial arts, and a few about Filipino culture. Bea and Harvey Dong would frequent both bookstores, and when they learned they might close, they offered to buy the business. In 1996, they took over the Berkeley storefront, which was previously about a block away on Shattuck Avenue.

Black and white picture of a man crouched over a desk
Harvey Dong in the Asian Community Center located in the basement of the I-Hotel in San Francisco, circa 1971. Photograph: Courtesy of Wei Min She and Stephen Louie

“We wanted to transform the bookstore to have books about Asian Americans and people of color,” Harvey Dong said. In 1998, the store moved to its University Avenue location.

In addition to the brick-and-mortar store, Eastwind also published about a dozen titles.

Bea and Harvey Dong themselves are part of the Asian American history that’s featured in many of the books on their shelves.

After the Third World Liberation Front strike – in which a coalition of students of color across California college campuses fought for ethnic studies and greater representation at their campuses in the late 1960s – Harvey Dong taught one of the first Asian American studies courses at UC Berkeley. Harvey Dong also helped open the first known Asian American bookstore in the US, Everybody’s Bookstore, which was located in the basement of the I-Hotel – a single-room occupancy hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown neighborhood that was the site of high-profile organizing against the evictions of low-income elderly Filipino Americans in the late 1960s.

While the brick-and-mortar shop will close, Eastwind will continue to sell books online, and its non-profit arm, Eastwind Books Multicultural Services, will still partner with libraries and organizations for events, and may publish some books.

Bea Dong says that what she will miss most about running the storefront for the past 27 years is the author readings and the sense of community. “To be able to hear someone’s story makes us grow in our understanding of the world,” she wrote in an email.

Kassie Pham worked part-time at Eastwind for five years, starting when she was an undergraduate at Berkeley. “I wouldn’t be who I am today if I didn’t have the privilege of working there under Bea and Harvey who nurtured not just me, but each and every one of their staff throughout the years,” Pham, who majored in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies, said via Instagram chat.

Pham said her learning wasn’t just from the tomes that lined the bookstores’ walls, but the many events and conversations that took place there.

She recalled reading about the events of the 1960s and 1970s – and then, because of her connections through the bookstore, being able to dine with some of the movement leaders at a restaurant across the street. “Those experiences are priceless and becoming increasingly rare as the [older generation] gets older,” Pham said, noting that people like Black Panther party co-founder Bobby Seale would sometimes stop by the bookstore or participate in events at the shop.

Harvey Dong standing in the bookstore.
Harvey Dong, who bought the store in 1996 alongside his wife Beatrice, says high rents and the workload required to keep the store running have proven too much as they approach retirement age. Photograph: Ximena Natera/Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight

One of Pham’s favorite memories was when poet Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, hosted a reading at Eastwind. “Not only did I get to meet him, [but] my friend and I walked around Shattuck at night with him and his partner just chatting about life, how we moved through the world in our Vietnamese American skin, and enjoying food.”

When the local news outlet Berkeleyside first reported that the neighborhood store would be closing in April, many visited the shop to enjoy it one last time. “It’s been quite an outpouring of people coming in, wanting to buy something or grab a memento,” Harvey Dong said.

But even as Eastwind closes, it’s giving life to the next generation.

Lucy Yu recalls visiting Eastwind as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She later moved to New York City, where in 2021, she opened Yu and Me Books, the first Asian American woman-owned bookstore.

The storefront has a bar and coffee shop, and stocks books by mostly authors of color and local writers. While the store does not exclusively focus on Asian American titles, Yu said that Eastwind set the blueprint for newer bookstores like hers.

“Eastwind definitely influenced me and how I wanted to create a community-focused bookstore,” Yu said. “Without their legacy, I don’t think I could have created something like that.”

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