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

theguardian.com:

T he 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