For Lucy Yu, who runs what’s believed to be New York City’s first Asian American woman-owned bookstore, losing her brick-and-mortar business was akin to losing a child. But since 4 July of this year, when a blaze engulfed the Chinatown building that housed Yu & Me Books, the 29-year-old has had little time to process her grief.
Within hours of the blaze, she shifted into rebuild mode: right after firefighters brought the fire under control, Yu and a friend ran into the store and hauled inventory into plastic bags and tarps. They salvaged a couple thousand books from the wreckage, just under half of the collection. The effort left Yu coughing and short of breath for the next two weeks.
“I don’t know how anyone gets through this without hitting dark times of depression and anxiety,” she said. “My heart got heavy and my body got heavy. You cannot rationalize heartbreak.”
Three years before the fire, Yu leased a former funeral supply shop on Mulberry Street to realize her childhood dream of opening a bookstore. She was going to be selective about the voices she spotlighted, focusing on immigrants and writers of color, authors whose works tended to be relegated to the back shelves of mainstream bookstores. “I felt like they deserved a multitude of shelves to hold them, and as big of a space as I was capable of giving them,” said Yu, who grew up in Los Angeles and was, until recently, a supply chain manager for a food company. With $20,000 in savings and $16,000 in donations, she built a bar and cafe, covered the space’s turquoise walls with Japanese woodblock prints, and purchased more than a thousand volumes.
More than a leading purveyor of underrepresented literary voices, Yu & Me Books quickly became a refuge for a community targeted by acute racial violence during the pandemic. Yu was hosting open mics and book signings with award-winning writers like Ocean Vuong and Sayaka Murata, and selling upwards of 100 books a day – beating her projected daily sales of 12 books, which she’d initially figured she’d need to break even. When the business became profitable after just four months, Yu quit her day job and soon was able to employ 10 others. “I’m thankful every single day to have the incredibly talented, logistically savvy and big-hearted people on my team that give so much more to the store and community outside of just bookselling,” she said.