ROTTERDAM — It was only last September, right before the closure of Mingya Bookstore, that Xiaodu first learned about this Chinese bookstore in Amsterdam’s Chinatown neighborhood. The bookstore’s windows were plastered with several eye-catching discount signs, as well as the traditional Chinese phrase, “Closed for business, clearance sale”.
Pushing the door, she felt like she was back in a local Chinese bookstore — big red plastic paper lanterns, Chinese calligraphy and paintings, teaching material, Buddhist books, acupuncture books, and even Chinese textbooks.
Xiaodu brought home two novels that day. Even though many of the books she found were not to her reading taste, she was saddened about the fact that it was closing down. A pity, she thought. Chinese paperback books are scarce in Europe, and there are only a few Chinese bookstores scattered in European cities such as Paris, Hamburg and Madrid.
If you want to buy Chinese paperbacks, you have to order them from online bookstores, where the shipping costs are high, and alternatively it’s not easy to visit a physical Chinese bookstore.
Xiaodu used to read Chinese books on her Kindle. When she left the bookstore that day, she ordered many of the books she wanted to read from online bookstores in mainland China, and waited for them to be shipped from China to the Netherlands, which would take nearly two months. They were all leisure books that interested her, Liu Zichao’s The Lost Satellite, Yang Xiao’s non-fiction literature Re-Walking, and Zheng Di’s full-length novel Swallowed Alive.
While waiting for the books, she suddenly had an idea: to open an online Chinese bookstore. Starting from scratch, she spent hours on YouTube learning how to build a website and a few weekends designing it.
Two boxes of Chinese books traveled all the way across the ocean and arrived at her home last December. Her Chinese bookstore was eventually up and running: Ferry Books (or Yedu Bookstore in Chinese, “yedu ” means “wild or deserted village ferry”) has been in business for almost a year now.
It is a “shared bookstore” where books can be delivered by mail or picked up. After buying a new book, readers can sell it back to the bookstore within two months at a 20% discount, and attach a handwritten note — either comments on the book, messages to other readers, or even doodles.
Xiaodu only receives a share of the profits, the rest goes towards the business.
The bookstore’s operating system is based on her own experience: “What if I buy a book and find that I don’t like it?”. For many international students who are returning to their home countries, as well as those who often have to rent accommodation and move more often, paper books can sometimes be a weighty “burden”.
Xiaodu hopes that people can buy books without this burden, keeping the ones they really like, returning the ones they don’t want to keep, and then giving them to others.
Bestseller from Japan
Xiaodu also collects second-hand books from readers at 40% or 50% off the Chinese RMB price, as well as out-of-print old books from China. Recently, she had just sold a copy of Liu Yunruo’s Little Yangzhou Zhi, which had been in the store for a few months. “A book will always find someone who likes it,” she says.
Most customers are young women.
The majority of her customers are young women. She guesses it might have something to do with her choice of books. When she first opened her business, Xiaodu met girls who had traveled four or five hours by train from Germany to an old Chinese bookstore in the Netherlands just to pick up the highly reviewed Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.
The bookstore’s current bestseller is a book by Japanese feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno. Over the past two to three years, Chizuko Ueno has been highly discussed on social media in China, and a number of Chinese translations of her works have been published. Although Xiaodu imagined that these books would indeed sell well before she bought them, she didn’t realize that she would have to replenish her stock over and over again.
At first, the bookstore’s selection of books centered around Xiaodu’s preferences. She loves to read realistic novels, ancient books on natural sciences, and is also interested in feminism.
But readers also influence her choices. Sometimes they would suggest books they wanted to read, and if Xiaodu thought they were suitable, she would buy them from China. Some people have also suggested books to learn how to play the guitar, study English, and French cooking, but she has not yet taken these suggestions on board. In April this year, Xiaodu set up a stall to sell books during the Dutch King’s Day parade, when a boy came to look around and said to her, “these are all popular novels, huh?” and left. Xiaodu went back home, started doing some research, and got some more philosophy books.
“You find some books according to your own taste, and after you gather some readers, the readers also recommend some books to you, which somehow changes your taste,” Xiaodu’s boyfriend says. He is a co-founder of Ferry Books and the couple takes care of the bookstore together.
Power of mother tongue
A bookstore was not always Xiaodu’s calling. After graduating with her master’s degree, she stayed in the Netherlands to work. Over the past few years, many of the friends she met while studying have gone back to their home countries one after another, but she doesn’t plan to go back just yet.
“Just to make a living, I prefer to have a work-life balance.” Xiaodu says. She has considered whether she wants to live in a different European country, but now with this bookstore, she won’t be leaving the Netherlands in the near future.
When she first came to the Netherlands to study for two years, she was very homesick. The weather was bad and it rained a lot. There were a lot of international students in the school, and although she didn’t feel like she couldn’t fit in, she didn’t really communicate with her classmates very much, and there was a sense of detachment, as they only touched on the surface of her culture.
There is no doubt that speaking a foreign language played a role in her detachment. Xiaodu says that if a person’s native language expression is 100%, then for her, English expresses only 70% or 60%, so when everyone is using their non-native language to speak, “sometimes it is more difficult to touch the soul.”
Xiaodu loves to read Chinese books, for her, it is a need. For her, reading in English is only necessary for professional purposes, and Chinese is much more comfortable than English for reading for leisure.
Shi Ping, one of the founders of the Blue Book House in Germany, a public service organization in Hannover with a Chinese library of more than 9,000 books, agrees on the significance of Chinese books. For her, reading books in foreign languages is more like a necessary journey of learning than enjoyment and nourishment.
Like going home
Ship Ping, who is Taiwanese, arrived in Germany in 1994 to study sociology, and has worked, raised a family, and settled here ever since. Her study abroad experience was completely different from Xiaodu’s. There were no e-books, no cell phones, and when she encountered words she didn’t know, she turned to a physical dictionary. Every time she arrived in Germany from Taiwan, her bag would be filled with Chinese books. She said it was a precious thing to see something in Chinese at that time.
She had times when she cried at home because she couldn’t understand the lessons or read the German books. She also experienced xenophobia. “At that time, some people thought that your level of language was equal to your intelligence, and they would disrespect you.”
There’s always a layer of language that is hard to cross.
When she was feeling lonely, or homesick, Shi Ping says that reading Chinese books felt like “going home”, like a “grounding device”.
Nowadays Shi Ping is well integrated in Germany. Together with her partner, she even participated in an encyclopedia quiz program on German TV and won many prizes.
“But there’s no way to understand it 100% even when you’re linguistically advanced.” Shi Ping says there is always a layer of language that is hard to cross. She is thankful that she received a complete education in Taiwan and can read Chinese without any obstacles.
Blue Book House
Blue Book House is located on the second floor of an old building in the center of Hannover. Shi Ping and her husband Jin Song got an engineer to calculate the load-bearing capacity of each wall and the number of books that could be placed on it, and finally built an entire oak floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the nearly eight-meter aisle. Later, they added two more shelves in the office and conference room. At that point they were able to put about 10,000 books down here.
“The library is a place where you feel like you belong, and we are part of a diaspora, a minority group overseas.” Shi Ping said.
After spending most of 2016 selecting books and waiting for 183 boxes totaling 3,037 tons of new books to be shipped from China in 2017, they then spent two months in their spare time organizing and categorizing them, designing barcodes and numbering them. The books they picked cover the fields of literature, art, social sciences, and young adult literature, with a small number of Hong Kong and Taiwanese editions. At present, Blue Bookstore has a collection of more than 9,400 books, and eight boxes of new Hong Kong edition books are currently on the way.
The “Chinese language library” here does not only refer to books by Chinese-speaking authors, but also to world literature and non-fiction, so a lot of the books are Chinese translations. “The intellectual property of mankind is shared, not necessarily confined to a particular ethnic group or country,” Shi Ping says.
Public space, spiritual community
Children, students, seniors over 65, and social assistance workers can borrow books for free after registration, while the annual fee for other members of the community is 10 euros for a maximum of five books at a time for one month.
Not only do Chinese books circulate here, but many lectures have also been organized.
Pointing to a poster, Shi Ping says that it was a Chinese father who drove his two families from Ukraine to Hannover, after the outbreak of the Ukraine war. On the day of the event, over thirty people came to the meeting room in the Blue Book House.
Shi Ping learned about his story by chance. He had brought his three children to the library to borrow books, and when she saw how well-behaved the children were, she chatted with him and realized that they had just come from Ukraine, so she invited him to share his story.
Many other scholars and lecturers, such as Chinese speakers, Germans learning Chinese, and more have spoken at the bookstore.
Before this, the local Chinese community in Hannover was more likely to gather in private, or in churches, and student associations. But Shi Ping feels that the Blue Book House has made a difference: it is indeed more of a Chinese public space and spiritual community.
Shi Ping and Jin Song, who are from Taiwan and China respectively, grew up in different backgrounds. But in the course of working together, they have been able to understand each other and remain curious about each other’s cultures. Shi Ping thinks this is an “awesome” thing in life, that “culture has no borders.”
Second-generation Chinese
Blue Book House has over 2,000 children’s picture books, with the most borrowed stories being Baba Dad and Emma the Elephant series. Shi Ping estimates that roughly one-third of Blue Book House’s customers are children.
The library is usually open four days a week, with several local Chinese volunteers coming to help. Its hours are similar to those of the local Chinese school, which allows parents who have finished dropping off their children to come over and look at the books, and after class is over, the parents can bring them back to sit for a while.
Blue Book House has also cooperated with the Chinese school in a small program to bring some very young second-generation immigrant children who are just about to learn Chinese. Jin Song feels that it is beneficial if children can speak Chinese and have a sense of their own culture — hence the significance of children’s books.
Many Chinese parents have the desire for their children to learn Chinese, or at the very least to hear and speak it. But the parents themselves are not always able to put in the time and energy for this. Some children can be confused about learning Chinese. Their mother tongue is already German, and they also feel that they will not go to China to work and live in the future, so why should they learn Chinese. For them, the homework for Chinese school is also an extra burden.
According to Shi Ping, Chinese families living abroad have a very special challenge with the continuation of their mother tongue.
When she couldn’t express herself in Chinese, their daughter would speak directly in German.
When her daughter was young, Shi Ping would read her stories from The Adventures of Tintin at bedtime. When she was seven or eight years old, she couldn’t always understand long sentences with adjectives, and would squirm and plead, “Mommy, read in German,” and Shi Ping would simplify the sentences. Although her daughter attends a local Chinese school, her Chinese is not as good as that of a child living in China. She loves to read, and she reads quickly. She can finish a German book of several hundred pages in two or three days, but if it’s in Chinese, she may only understand four or five words in a line, so she doesn’t want to read it voluntarily.
But whenever she goes back to Taiwan, she and her grandparents try to speak Chinese as much as possible. Shi Ping doesn’t want to put too much pressure on her daughter, as long as she’s not a stranger to Chinese, “If you ask her to write the same Chinese character 200 times, won’t she break down?”
Sometimes when she couldn’t express herself in Chinese, their daughter would speak directly in German, which Shi Ping thought was fine. She hopes that when her daughter reads more and comes to Blue Book House, she will know that there is a group of second-generation Chinese kids with similar backgrounds to hers. At school, she was the only one in her class who “looked different”.
Looking toward the future
Shi Ping has been successful with Blue Book House, after many hurdles and obstacles — including shipping books, engineering the shop, and creating a space for Chinese immigrants in Germany. She also hopes to engage and connect with more Chinese and German institutions in the future.
Since opening the online bookstore, Xiaodu has more pressure, she needs to produce content on her social media accounts regularly, and no longer reads books as idly as she used to. Her life is also busy, with work Monday through Friday, and on weekends — putting new books on the shelves, writing promotional posts, packaging, and shipping. She feels a little stretched, both in terms of time management and book inventory, and she always feels like she needs to put more effort into her work.
She also plans to add a “circulation station” if the bookstore finds an offline space, where people can leave unwanted books and circulate them for free to others who need them.
After living in the Netherlands for six years, Xiaodu has gotten used to the sense of alienation. “It’s just something to get used to, because it was your choice.” she says, “If you don’t mind that, you’ll slowly have a little bit of connection to this place in your life.”
She often eats at the Chinese restaurant downstairs, and now has a close relationship with the owner, whom she considers a bit like family. She says this may be the destiny of a “generation of immigrants”, who, no matter how deeply involved in society they are in their work and life, will always feel like outsiders.
A Chinese restaurant that satisfies the taste buds is a link to the homeland. So is a Chinese book.
