Lucy Yu Is Redefining What A Bookstore Can Be

When I tell Yu that I recently read the book, a richly researched narrative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its effects on four generations of Chin’s family, Yu’s face lights up. She recommends another book to me: New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s “The Snakehead,” which covers some of the history in “Mott Street” but chronicles it through a much different lens.

Yu stocks the store with a mix of acclaimed new books and older offerings that might not be on most readers’ radars — “backlist” titles, as they say in publishing. To decide what to feature in the store and recommend to customers, Yu conducts meticulous research, scrolling through book-related social media and the StoryGraph app, as well as doing “a lot of deep Googling.”

Some of her choices just come down to “vibes,” as she explained. On a fundamental level, “I want a story to surprise someone, so I’m always looking for that,” she said. For example, maybe it’s a book about an immigrant family dealing with “complicated family dynamics within the context of a generational gap, cultural gap, language gap, all these things — like, that’s the baseline. But are you able to do something a little different with it?” she said. “I think that’s my ultimate goal: to get people to not overgeneralize.”

Her current staff pick in the store is “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes” by William Bridges, originally published in the 1980s. Recommended by a friend, the book gave Yu a new way of thinking about life transitions, as someone who has experienced several of them in the past few years.

In 2021, deep into the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, she took a huge leap of faith to open Yu & Me, a long-held dream of hers. As the only bookstore in New York City owned by an Asian American woman, and with a mission of spotlighting immigrant writers and authors of color, the store quickly became beloved and acclaimed, and its historic location in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown has made it a vibrant hub for literary events.

But last summer, a fire ravaged the store, rendering much of the space unusable. Yu juggled rebuilding the store and setting up a temporary space at a nearby market hall to keep selling books and holding events. Originally slated to take a year, she got the renovation work done ahead of schedule, reopening Yu & Me in just seven months.

Yu, 29, has been through a lot, to say the least. So Bridges’ book came to her at the right time, giving her a whole new way of thinking about life transitions.

“I’m very much in a transitional state of my life, of understanding: What versions did I lose with the previous versions of the store? What do I really want to engage in now that I’ve kind of had to start again? What parts of my life do I want to bring back in? What do I want to change?” Yu said. “I think I used to really want to rush through transitional periods because they’re kind of like a neutral zone. This is what the book talks about. For any new beginning, you do have to go through a process of a defined end, a neutral transitional period and then a beginning. And how you’ve navigated those different kinds of flows in the past is part of what indicates how you want to approach them in the future. But you also have the choice of actually letting yourself sit within the transitional period of a neutral zone without jumping so far to a new beginning before the neutral zone is over.”

So much of what makes a great bookstore is the magic of connecting the right book to the right person, and being in community with others through books. Yu has been doing a version of that her whole life. Growing up in Los Angeles, she was raised by a single mom, a microbiologist who emigrated from China. Yu’s mother spent long hours in the lab, so Yu turned to pop culture to feel less alone. Much of her childhood was spent doing “two things: either going to the library, or going to the DVD store next to our house,” she recalled.

Pop culture gave the mother and daughter a way to connect and to transcend their cultural, generational and language gaps.

“I think we were really trying to understand how to understand this country, and I felt like media was our chosen weapon to kind of understand our identity,” Yu said, recalling how the two of them “didn’t have family dinners — we just watched movies at dinner,” or how her mom would “pregame work with ‘Dawson’s Creek,’” waking up at 6 a.m. to view the show each morning. “This woman is, like, made of stone,” Yu said.

She and her mom are constantly exchanging recommendations and talking to each other about the books they’ve read or the movies they’ve watched. Recently, her mother read eight books on Palestine to educate herself on the crisis in Gaza, Yu said. Or when the two of them read Min Jin Lee’s “Free Food for Millionaires,” Yu then recommended the George Eliot classic “Middlemarch,” which influenced Lee’s novel. Looking back, Yu sees that pop culture has always given her and her mom a common language for understanding each other and demonstrating care.

“I’m like, ‘Watch “Terms of Endearment,”’ and then she comes back with ‘Watch “Anywhere but Here” with Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.’ I’m like, ‘OK, well, let’s watch “Lady Bird.”’ That’s how we communicate,” Yu said.

Her aspiration to open a bookstore also dates back to her childhood. Yu & Me was inspired by a now-closed spot she frequented as a kid: Abbot’s Habit, which was part coffee shop, part bookstore, and displayed the work of local artists.

“I was like: ‘That’s what I want to do. I wanna open a café-bookstore.’ And that was always the dream,” she said. Yu thought it was something she might do in retirement, but it ended up happening much sooner than she expected — “if my retirement age was sped up about 40 years,” she quipped.

The pandemic was the turning point that put things into perspective. A chemical engineer by training, Yu’s first job after college was a three-year rotational program, so she moved around about every nine months. Feeling drained, she became interested in food, first working as a line cook while still at her day job as an engineer, and then becoming a supply chain manager at a food startup, which took her to New York.

By early 2021, that job didn’t feel fulfilling either. The pandemic made her realize that “maybe life is just way less predictable than I thought. That just really made me feel like I should do things for the narrative that I want to build in my life, because I don’t know at what point my life will be taken away from me without my control,” Yu said. “I was like, ‘I cannot spend my days working 70 hours a week shipping soups and smoothies.’ If the world really needs people that wake up and care about something, it was just such a big disconnect. And I feel like that’s a huge fuel for me to figure out anything. I’m like, ‘If I am passionate or if I’m angry enough about something, I will figure it out.’”

It began with Googling “how to run a bookstore.” From there, Yu’s science background came in handy. She started with a hypothesis and figured out the conditions and variables of starting a bookstore, such as the proportions of new and used books to buy, or how much money she’d need to rent a storefront. “Being a scientist and being a small-business owner are really not that different,” she said. “I literally treated it like an engineering experiment.”

She has discovered many parallels between science and running her store. “A lot of chemistry is about attraction and repulsion,” Yu said. “All of this is a balance, and I think that with us as humans, this endlessness of that feels very hard to digest. We like to think of things as linear — always stable, constant — while peak stability in science is really just the cyclical back-and-forth between attraction and repulsion.

“I think that there’s a big disconnect between people in science not engaging in the arts and vice versa, whereas I do think there’s so much power that I’ve experienced in the knowledge of the integration of both,” she continued, pointing out how “the cycle of attraction and repulsion” also applies to human relationships. “Sometimes, it can look like a very strong bond but decay over time, and you kind of just don’t know until you live that out. And sometimes it starts off unstable and becomes really stable. And I feel like understanding those fluctuations in human interactions is kind of the core. Running a retail business is like understanding the humans behind it and understanding how we can interact with humans in a very meaningful, patient way to achieve something closer to equilibrium.”

Lately, Yu has been trying to reach something closer to equilibrium in her own life. The stress of the fire, and then pouring everything into rebuilding the store while also running her pop-up location, meant that her own health fell by the wayside. It occurs to her now that she could have forgone the pop-up and lightened her load a bit. But at the time, she felt like she owed it to authors, readers and everyone who had supported the store to keep Yu & Me going in some capacity or another.

“I was like, ‘Well, what other option is there?’ It felt unfair when we got all of this momentum, and people were interested in the books that we were choosing and the voices we were highlighting. And it just didn’t feel fair to the artists that were still working so hard during that period that we were closed. I’m nothing without the books on the shelves. And I also owe something to the books on our shelves,” she said. “That relationship, it’s like the attraction-repulsion thing — like, I have to invest in it for it to invest in me. I probably should have taken more time to take care of myself during that time, and I’ll process that later. But I owe something to the arts because without writing, my store wouldn’t exist.”

A lot of children of immigrants struggle to unlearn the survival mode we saw with our parents. From watching her mom, Yu thinks she internalized the idea that being successful requires being self-reliant. But now, she’s learning that she can lean on other people.

“I think I had to build community for other people for me to believe that it could exist for myself too,” Yu said. “It’s the biggest lesson that I learned.”

Recently, Yu finally gained the financial breathing room to hire a general manager, giving her a bit more time and brain space to take better care of herself — and to make bigger-picture plans for the store.

She’s starting to incorporate more music — pairing books with records and hosting listening parties at the shop — to give readers a means of “understanding our identity and our culture through music, and what kind of literature helps feed that as well, because I do think that full, immersive space is really helpful for our brains,” she said.

Yu is also pondering ways to use technology and e-commerce to reach people outside of New York. For instance, she’s developing the capacity to ship signed and personalized copies of books offered at Yu & Me. She’s also brainstorming how to widen the reach of the store’s in-person author events, but in a more creative way than “a Zoom virtual chat — which no one really likes, let’s be honest,” she said.

However, she wants to be mindful about her approach, noting that traditional forms of e-commerce can be too consumerist and depersonalized. “Can we really add humanness to it, and does that help people engage in e-commerce a little bit differently?” Yu said. “This requires me to Rubik’s Cube the way that things are currently built and then add something different to it, which is kind of what I’m grappling with right now.”

Building something intentionally and responsibly is also how Yu sees the store’s role as a literary hub and community space. She aims to offer a range of events at Yu & Me, spotlighting not just the buzziest authors but also emphasizing local and self-published writers, as well as those from independent presses, who could use the boost that a bookstore event provides. The shop is frequently lauded for its deep roster of Asian American authors, but like those writers, Yu & Me aims to not be pigeonholed as Asian American.

“We’ve been siloed so often into an Asian American bookstore because I am Asian American, and I opened up a bookstore, and I’m in Chinatown,” Yu said. “The integration of it is lost, and it’s flattened because of identity politics. And that ends up really limiting our interactions for a larger community.”

When I asked Yu to describe her approach to building community, her answer naturally involved a bit of science. “Have you heard of the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio? It creates that perfect spiral that’s seen so much in nature, and the idea of the sequence is, like, every number is built up on the two consecutive numbers before it. And it’s considered the perfect ratio,” she said.

“I think that’s the same way you build community. You build a community of two by connecting with one person here and one person here, and they connect with someone else,” she continued. “It can’t just be like, one big arm works for everyone, and all of a sudden, ‘oh, it’s community.’ Or it’s like: ‘Oh, look, we’re all Asian American. Now we’re in community together.’ That flattens our diasporic identity. That is not respectful enough to us as human beings to kind of wash it like that. And so I think, to build community is literally the hard work of one-on-one interactions that add together and snowball to this sequence of numbers that add together to a larger sequence of numbers.”

Or, in Yu’s case, it’s one book and one person at a time, adding up to an abundance of book lovers.