On Saturday, April 18, Finger Lakes resident and author Rikki Marcin will be at Bleak House Books to talk about her new true crime book, Murder in Steuben County, published by History Press. Rikki is also the author of the 2020 true crime book, Murder and Mayhem in the Finger Lakes. If you are a local history buff, true crime aficionado, or both (!), you will not want to miss this event!

Rikki will field questions from the audience and sign copies of her book following her talk.

The event is free and open to the public. No reservations required.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:

Nestled in the heart of upstate New York, Steuben County’s rural scenery belies a sinister past.

Since the hanging of Robert Douglass in 1825, the county has been the center of a series of murders that resulted in controversial outcomes. Seaman Simons, part of an alleged love triangle, cheated his death sentence after killing his rival. “The Wayland Murderess” Mary Hess inexplicably shot her neighbor and brother within minutes of each other. David Dunn became the only person from the county to die in Auburn Prison’s electric chair, and Hugh Bray’s delusions about a young man breaking up his landlord’s home climaxed in a fatal scene.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

RIKKI MARCIN, a resident of the Finger Lakes region, studied languages at Elmira College and has a master’s degree in French literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her work has appeared in Bluff & Vine, the Watkins Review & Express and The Observer. She is the author of Murder & Mayhem in the Finger Lakes (The History Press, 2020).

Calling all crafters and craftivists! On March 21 at 2 PM, local craftivist guru, Hinda Mandell, will be leading a crafting circle at Bleak House Books. Bring your in-progress craft projects or start one from scratch (materials will be provided)!

Hinda will also talk about her new book, Global Craftivism Since The Pussycats, published by Bloomsbury this past January.

Hinda will be joined by the good people from the Craftivist Network of Greater Rochester, who will offer ideas for and resources to craftivists looking for new projects or who wish to meet other local craftivists.

So gather up your yarn, your needles, your pluck, and come crafting with us at BHB!

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EVENT DETAILS

WHEN: Saturday, March 21 at 2 PM

WHERE: Bleak House Books, 5 W Main St, Honeoye Falls, NY 14472 (parking in front of and behind the store)

RSVPs appreciated for this crafting event so please send us an email at info@bleakhousebooks.com if you plan to attend

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SPEAKER BIO

HINDA MANDELL is a professor in the School of Communication at RIT in New York. Mandell is editor of Global Craftivism since the Pussyhats: Handcraft Responses to Violence, War, Illness and Isolation (Bloomsbury 2026) and the forthcoming author of Crafting Choice: Handcraft and Abortion Politics in the U.S. (August 2026, Bloomsbury). She’s also editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and co-curator and co-editor of Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism (RIT Press, 2019). Since 2017, she has organized maker interventions on issues of social reform reaching 2,000 craft participants. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times and The Associated Press, among other media outlets, on the importance of making objects by hand.

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On Saturday, January 31st, we welcome writer, scholar of religion and Nazareth College professor, Dr. Corinne Dempsey, to Bleak House Books. Corinne will be joined by Dr. Deborah King, professor emerita of psychiatry for the University of Rochester Medical Center.

They will discuss Corinne’s new book, A View From Life’s Edge: Discovering What Really Matters With Older Women across the Globe, published by Rutgers University Press. Audience Q & A and book signing to follow.

Event starts at 2 pm. No reservations required. Ample parking behind the bookshop (lot entrance on Monroe St). Look forward to seeing everyone then!

SPEAKER BIOS:

CORINNE G. DEMPSEY is professor and chair of Religious Studies at Nazareth University in Rochester, NY. Her earlier books are on Christianity in South India, Hinduism in the US, and spirit traditions in northern Iceland. If asked, she would tell you that her most rewarding project so far has been this one, in the company of older women across the globe.

More information about Corrine here.

DEBORAH KING is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emerita in Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Her clinical and scholarly interests include geropsychology, bereavement, and end-of-life challenges. Since retiring from the medical center, she has deepened her engagement with Dharma Refuge, a local Buddhist community, and currently enjoys teaching meditation there.

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In a year defined largely by bad news, shocking news and news-not-worth-sharing-other-than-as-a-warning-of-things-to-come, one short lived news cycle sticks out in my mind. It lasted one maybe two weeks and concerned the proliferation of unregulated, profit-driven AI technology. During that time, expert after expert took to the airwaves to warn of the dangers that this technology, if left unchecked, would pose to the public. A few such experts, I seem to recall, were the same ones who helped design and commercialize for public consumption the kinds of AI bots we now see with every click of the mouse or swipe of the screen, insistently asking us if we can “use some help” with an innately human activity like writing, drawing or composing music.

Not much happened during or after this news cycle. No national study was commissioned to study the effects, both good and bad, of AI technology. No comprehensive federal legislation has been enacted to protect the public from the harmful effects of AI and to hold accountable those who use AI in a way intended to place others in harm’s way. In fact, as the year came to a close, the President issued an executive order that would thwart much of the fledgling and incremental progress other parties, including state governments, have made to address the concerns raised by experts about unregulated, AI technology.

Jenny and I and our kids were recently invited to a dinner hosted by some good friends we met through the bookshop. During the dinner, Michael, one of our hosts, asked Charlie about school. What were his interests, what did he want to do after school, etc, etc. Charlie mentioned being a part of his school robotics team. Michael, who knows a thing or two about computers, asked Charlie what programming language he used to program the robots he and his teammates built. Charlie said “Scratch” but that he didn’t like it or find it especially effective. Then Michael said to Charlie something to the effect of: it really doesn’t matter what language you use. It’s the problem that matters most. Once you define the problem, then you will find the right language to suit your needs.

This past year, I forced myself to draw again, like I did often when I was a kid. I have at the bookshop one of those sandwich board signs that I’ve commandeered for this purpose. It’s forgiving because the chalk goes on and comes off easily. The only pressures I feel when I’m drawing are those of time (the bookshop ain’t gonna run itself) and aesthetics (the drawing should be faithful to whatever it is I envision as being my sign of the day). I have taken up this activity of drawing because I want to prove to myself that it’s something I can do, and do with a level of competence that doesn’t derive in any way from the whims of a faceless, grovelling robot.

To borrow from Michael’s profound observation and astute advice to Charlie: it’s the language I have decided to adopt and use to address what I see as the problem of unchecked, artificial intelligence. My language is one of labor, of creativity, of thought, perhaps even of emotion too. It is, in my view, the language that makes humans unique among the many other living species with whom we share this planet.

I worry sometimes that we are in peril of losing this language through systemic atrophy and disuse; a tragedy hastened and abetted by the greed and muscle of the rich and powerful. In writing this piece, I wish only to describe what I perceive as a reality that might be shared by others. I don’t expect that anyone will decide to take up drawing, creative writing or photography after reading this. Nor do I believe that such a response is warranted to combat the dangers posed by our freewheeling AI purveyors. It is enough, for now, to remind ourselves that humans, however imperfect and limited they might be, still possess in themselves the keys to their collective destiny.

Haruki Murakami, still one of our greatest living novelists, said it best:

We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

2025, you’ve done your worst. Now it’s our turn to return the favor. Bring on 2026.

I’m going to start this talk the way most other people start their talks: by thanking the person who roped me into doing it in the first place. That person’s name is Mei.

By now, it’s a cliche to say that we’re living in troubled times. Not because it isn’t true, it most certainly is. But when someone says something like that, it’s important to think about how and why these times are so troubling.

Sadly, universities like RIT have become ground zero for a lot of what’s ailing this country. As I was writing this talk, I saw news that the government had revoked the visas of at least eleven foreign students and alumni at the University of Rochester. RIT wasn’t spared either, and reported that immigration authorities had revoked the visas of several of their own students.

This is all part of the efforts of the administration not just to stifle dissent but, really, to reshape the culture and values of this country. And not in a good way. It is a country that values raw power and doublespeak above all else. Other values like free speech, scientific inquiry, and diversity matter only to the extent to which they advance the interests of people in power. Which, right now, isn’t much at all.

There are many universities out there that have fought back. Others have adopted a more transactional approach, trying to stay on the good side of the president by giving him some but not all of what he wants. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a bully knows, however, that giving in to the bully only encourages him to bully you more.

It is against this backdrop that Mei emailed me out of the blue. All she wanted to do was to organize a field trip for her students to a local bookshop run by a washed up lawyer. But in this climate, when acts once thought to be non-controversial are being examined and debated to eternity, Mei’s email came as something of a surprise. Finally, I thought to myself, here’s someone who wasn’t about to give in to the bully.

This is all a very long way of saying thank you to Mei for reaching out. I’m inspired and encouraged by your bravery and compassion for your students.

Okay, so I’m at the part of my talk when I really wish I had a warm-up act. I know many of you right now are resisting the urge to look at your phones. That bowling accident mash up reel isn’t going to watch itself. Well, I don’t have a warm-act up today. I have something even better: a bookshop-themed thought exercise.

Imagine you know nothing about Bleak House Books, about me, or the story of the bookshop. It’s summertime. School’s out. You and a few of your friends have rented a cute little cottage by Keuka Lake for the week. On the way to the cottage, you decide to take a slight detour through our beautiful village of Honeoye Falls. You see our rustic bookshop sign out front and decide to stop in and see what we’re all about. I mean, who can pass up an old timey bookshop in an old timey village setting?

Thankfully, it’s not a Monday or a Tuesday, so the shop is open. You walk in through the front door and see this grumpy, middle-aged Asian guy sitting behind the checkout counter. What might be some of the first thoughts to cross your mind?

Here are some of the things that I might be wondering to myself if I were in your shoes. “Does this guy also work at the Chinese takeout down the block?” “How does he manage to make any money?” “Is he here because he lost big on some kind of bet?” “Maybe that’s why he’s always frowning?”

Because let’s face it. Appearances matter. First impressions matter. As the famously funny, Floridian writer Carl Hiassen once said:

“The humane qualities of any new acquaintance should be evident in the first five minutes of conversation – ten minutes, tops. If it requires the psychological equivalent of a metal detector to locate somebody’s true self, then they’re not worth the trouble. Life is short. Say goodbye.”

I’m hoping that by this time in the talk I’ve convinced enough of you that I’m worth the trouble.

Returning to our thought exercise, I think it’s fair to say that not many people who step foot in this bookshop for the first time, could imagine that the Asian guy behind the counter is a former civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. Born in Queens. Raised in suburban Long Island. Sucked at math. Loved RPG video games and comic books. Okay, you probably could’ve guessed the last one.

For those of you who know about the story of Bleak House Books, you know that you’re really at the second iteration of the bookshop. I moved to Hong Kong in late 2016 with Jenny, my wife, and our two kids, Charlie and Ida. I had never lived in Hong Kong or any other foreign country up until that time. But my parents were born and raised in Hong Kong. They left the city for the States at a relatively young age. At home though, with my sister and myself, my parents still spoke Cantonese, watched Canto dramas, observed the lunar new year, and prepared foods like stir fried beef with broccoli, steamed fish (with the head still on), spam and macaroni soup, and, of course, hot pot. In Canto, we say “da been lo” for hot pot, which literally means “hanging out by the side of the stove”.

I’ve never told anyone this but it was liberating for me to live in a place like Hong Kong. How so? For starters, I looked like everyone else. Black hair, brown eyes, vertically challenged. Also, I spoke and understood the Cantonese language and all the quirky, often profane expressions that come out of it. One of the worst Cantonese insults you can say to another person is: “hum ga tsan” which translates to: “may your whole family go bankrupt.” If you’re going to remember anything from this talk, please do not remember that.

Granted, my childhood home in suburban Long Island had some diversity too, even back in the late-80’s, mid-90’s. My best friend in third grade, Gerald Tam, also had parents from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese. But I didn’t need to travel too far to feel like I stuck out like a sore thumb. The only thing more embarrassing than carrying a powder blue Care Bears lunch box with a matching Thermos is having to explain to classmates and teachers what I had brought for lunch that day in my Care Bears lunchbox. “That’s not a steaming snowball. It’s a red bean bun!”

There was something else about Hong Kong and Hongkongers though that gave me a sense of belonging and freedom that I didn’t always feel like I had in the U.S: a communal energy and shared sense of purpose. One of the great things about being a bookseller is that I learn about new books and writers all the time. Jan Morris is one of those writers. Someone with British and Welsh roots, Morris gained fame for being a part of the British expedition in 1953 that successfully conquered Mount Everest. Up until that time, no one had reached the summit of that legendary mountain. But two intrepid explorers named Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay changed that. Morris was there to capture the moment and sent news of this historic accomplishment back home to Britain.

Jan Morris, whose birth name was James Morris, is also known for being one of the first public figures to identify as transexual. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1973 to become a woman. As a historian and travel writer, Morris lived all over the world, including in Hong Kong. And she’s probably penned the best ever passage to describe the kind of “communal energy and shared sense of purpose” that moved me as a Hongkonger. Here’s that passage:

Sometimes in the early morning I like to walk down to one of the city waterfronts, to watch the lights of the ships go by, share the pleasures of the couples strolling along the piers, or eat fried chicken on a bench in the gathering dark. The air is likely to be rich and humid, the sky is lit with the brooding glow of a great city’s lights, blotting out the stars. It does not matter where I am, Kowloon or Hong Kong-side; around me always beyond the little pool of quiet I have made for myself on bench or bollard, the huge endless stir of the place, the roar of the traffic, the passing of the ships, the comings and goings of the ferries, combine into one gigantic sensation of communal energy. For the most part, I know very well, it is not energy expended in any very high-flown purpose, but still its ceaseless rumble and motion move me, and I sit there gnawing my chicken, drinking my San Miguel beer from the can, more or less entranced.

“One gigantic sensation of communal energy.” Some might dismiss Morris’s phrasing as hyperbole. But I want to tell you, it’s a real thing. Like Morris, I felt it too. And it saved my life as a bookseller.

One of the hardest things I had to do when I started selling books in Hong Kong was to actually start selling books. Not many people understood or supported my decision to open a bookshop. A lot of them focused on the fact that I was once a lawyer. “It’s a waste” they would say “to throw away your legal training to sell books. Of course, I didn’t listen to them. But their words still stung. And I spent a lot of time and energy looking over my shoulder at my own place of business, unsure of whether I had made the right choice to ditch the law and sell books. These pangs of self-doubt, as you can imagine, came at the worst times: usually when I was knee-deep in some tedious and soul-sucking task like cleaning grubby books or being nickeled and dimed by a guy who wanted to sell me his worthless paperbacks. During these times, I’d think to myself: “I went to law school for this?”

I can’t tell you when, exactly, I stopped looking over my shoulder and embraced my work as a bookseller. But I did turn the corner at some point, and I haven’t looked back since. What got me there was what Morris called the “communal energy” of Hongkongers.

I felt this energy early and often after moving to Hong Kong. I felt it on the streets, commuting to and from work. I felt it in the wet markets where I shopped for fresh produce and seafood. I felt it among my awesome and brave bookseller colleagues who built their own bookshops and communities from the ground up like I did.

No one can talk about the “communal energy” of Hongkongers, however, without talking about the historic 2019 protests that shook the city to its very core. At its height, almost one-third of the entire Hong Kong population – around 2 million people – took to the streets to voice their demands and anger at the government. What started as a dispute over a government-sponsored bill that would have given the authorities the power to extradite Hongkongers to mainland China for certain crimes, morphed into a city-wide reckoning over what it meant to be a Hongkonger under Chinese rule.

If you ask any Hongkonger who attended a protest in 2019: “what sets Hong Kong apart from its mainland neighbor?”, that person will likely answer: freedom and rule of law. These values meant so much to so many Hongkongers that they turned out, en masse, week after week, month after month, in an unprecedented show of force and solidarity. It was just the kind of “gigantic sensation of communal energy” that Jan Morris believed was the defining character trait of Hongkongers.

The protests didn’t let up until sometime in early 2020. That was when the COVID pandemic hit and also when Beijing imposed its National Security Law in Hong Kong that essentially criminalised any anti-government speech.

The front line means different things to different people. If you are in the military or have a loved one who is a service member, to you, the front line might mean someone who is in the thick of armed conflict. If you are a doctor, the front line might mean a healthcare professional working long shifts in the ER or a scientist at a laboratory conducting breakthrough research . If you lived through the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, however, the term front line, or tseen seen in Cantonese, might mean something more like this:

The chant echoed in the canyon between the buildings, under the looming concrete overpasses: ‘Gwong fuk Heung Gong! Sidoi Gaakming!’ ‘Reclaim Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!’

As the crowd prepared for the police onslaught, the fully equipped frontline troops – kitted out in their black-bloc attire, yellow hard hats, and face masks – came running in formation through the crowd to face the police lines. The crowd roared in support. With their improvised shields made from road signs and planks of wood, the frontline braves had picked up a new trick from the riot police, who would beat their shields with their batons as an intimidation tactic. The protestors began to do the same, beating their shields against the ground or against the barricades, beating the traffic dividers and rubbish bins with umbrellas – a beat that was tribal, raw, a death rattle that rallied their spirits as they faced the police, who now came in full-bore with tear gas and rubber bullets. A violent clash ensued, with bricks being thrown, protestors wielding slingshots, and, for the first time, Molotov cocktails being hurled. A barricade was set ablaze.

That’s from Antony Dapiran’s book City on Fire, which was one of the first English-language books written and published about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. We sold many copies of that book when we had our bookshop in Hong Kong. Today though that book is effectively banned in the city, and anyone who tries to sell it risks prosecution by the authorities.

By now, I think many of you want to know what all this has to do with Bleak House Books. Like many other individuals and businesses in Hong Kong, we took sides in the protest. We called out the government for its many lies and its constant gaslighting of the public. We attended protests and participated in general strikes. We stocked and sold books that provided some much needed historical, philosophical, and journalistic context to the protests and public fury. To our bookshop family, this was the right thing – really the only thing – to do. Silence would have meant complicity.

It is fair to ask what we all achieved in our resistance. Beijing continued to tighten its authoritarian grip on Hong Kong despite all of the protests and overwhelming opposition of the public. There’s no longer an opposition party in Hong Kong. News outlets and residents alike must be careful not to cross an ever-shifting, ill-defined “red line” in what they say or write about the government. With the increasingly oppressive political climate, my wife and I had to make the difficult decision to leave Hong Kong with our two children. Thousands of other Hongkongers left as well. And Bleak House Books, as you all know, suffered a similar fate. We closed it on October 15, 2021.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of anger and heartbreak in our family during that period of upheaval and loss. The spirit of the resistance never left us though. Even today, that spirit burns bright in the hearts and minds of many Hongkongers including myself. And it burns especially bright in the place where you now sit. A simple bookshop with a new lease on life. Conceived from and nurtured in Hong Kong’s trademark “gigantic sensation of communal energy.” We continue to carry the torch of resistance in our new home of Honeoye Falls so others can do the same.

To quote the great American civil rights activist, John Lewis: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is a struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

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On Saturday, June 22, 2024 at 2 pm, Scott Fybush, whose voice you’ve probably heard on WXXI, Rochester’s local NPR station, moderates a panel discussion with our local librarians. The directors of three local libraries (Adrienne Pettinelli from Henrietta Public Library, Kendyl Litwiller from Naples Public Library, and Ken Fox from the George Eastman Museum library) and a long-time children’s services librarian at Gates Public Library (Mary Jo Smith), sit down to talk about life as a librarian in the age of BookTok and book bans.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR AND PANELISTS

Scott Fybush – A native of Rochester, Scott Fybush is a journalist, radio consultant and passionate reader. He was the creator and longtime host of “Summer Book Week” on public radio in Rochester. In his spare time, Scott does storytelling and standup comedy. He lives in Brighton with his wife, Lisa, two kids, a dog and many piles of books.

Ken Fox – Ken Fox is the Head of Library and Archives at the Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Formerly the associate editor of The Motion Picture Guide and a film reviewer for TV Guide, he is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation/University of Rochester master’s program, and holds a graduate degree in Information Science from the State University of New York at Albany.

Kendyl Litwiller – Kendyl Litwiller-Sutherby was appointed Director of Naples Library in July 2021. She joined the Naples Library team in 2017 as a part time clerk and has been part of the Naples Community almost her entire life. Kendyl is committed to providing high quality services to her community, to creating a welcoming environment for both library patrons and staff, as well as supporting staff professionally in the library and beyond. She also loves to read.

Adrienne Pettinelli – Adrienne Pettinelli is the Director of the Henrietta Public Library in Rochester, NY, and author of Helping Homeschoolers in the Library (2008, ALA Editions). She has served on several book award committees, including the 2015 Caldecott Selection Committee, and is a reviewer specializing in picture books and beginning readers for Horn Book Magazine. She teaches for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Mary Jo Smith – Mary Jo Smith has been a children’s services librarian for over 40 years. Her first professional job was at the New Britain Public Library in Connecticut. She moved to the Farmington Branch Library in 1985 (right across from Miss Porter’s, the school attended by Jackie Onassis) before moving back to Rochester in 1988 as the Children’s Services Librarian at the Gates Public Library. Over her 36 years at that library, she has developed many new programs and services for the Gates community, especially in the area of early childhood. She was instrumental in getting an Early Learning Center in the library, which provides children with the opportunity to practice the skills they need to enter school ready to read. She has served in a number of roles in the Youth Services Section of the New York Library Association, and is currently the section’s Second Vice President. Locally, she is the Senior Warden of St. John’s Episcopal church, and was the Secretary for Music Boosters.

Please join us on Saturday, June 22, 2024 at 11 am for an author talk and book signing with Jack Butler and Diane Ham, authors of Mendon Ponds Park: Fairchild’s Dream, a superb history of our beloved Mendon Ponds Park, the largest park in Monroe County. Jack leads frequent tours through the park for Fairchild Tours, and Diane is the long-time historian for the Town of Mendon. Come listen to Jack and Diane share their stories about how their book came about and learn about the Mendon Ponds Park you never knew existed!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jack Butler – Jack spent most of his professional career in medical diagnostics and medical devices launching first-of-their-kind FDA cleared products in women’s health within the United States.  After over 30 years in healthcare, he started his own family run business.  For decades, he has run, hiked, skied, and explored the Park on and off trail, which led to research into various aspects of Mendon Ponds.  In 2021, Jack initiated the Fairchild Walking Tours with approval from the County of Monroe Parks Department and sponsorship by the Town of Pittsford Department of Recreation.  A variety of Tours leads participants through different areas while he shares information about the Park’s history, glacial features, former residents, flora and fauna, and unique features. Jack and spouse, Peggy, have been married forty-one years and have 2 children and 2 grandchildren.  Jack is a graduate of SUNY Cortland.

Diane Ham – Diane Ham was born in Oklahoma, grew up in Michigan, spent a few years in Kentucky and has lived in the Brighton / Mendon, New York area for about fifty-five years.  She has a BS degree in business administration from Central Michigan University.  She has been Mendon Town Historian, where she currently lives, for forty-five years.  She has written several books and booklets on Mendon subjects.  She became a registered historian of New York State in 2005 and is past president of the Monroe County Municipal Historians and a member of the Association of Public Historians of New York State.  In her spare time, she and her husband, Rodney, of sixty years enjoy renovating their old farmhouse, camping, and traveling extensively.  They have two married sons and two granddaughters who live in Michigan.

Nov. 11, 2023 11 AM onward Rachael Gootnick and Tony Zanni

POP UP INTERACTIVE BOOK ARTS! Local print artisans, Rachael Gootnick (Just Terrific Handcrafted Goods, http://justterrific.com/) and Tony Zanni (Type High Letterpress, https://typehigh.com/) will be setting up shop at Bleak House Books with some fun, hands-on, kid-friendly book and printmaking activities throughout the day. Long live print!

Nov. 11, 2023 1 PM Linda Sue Park

LINDA SUE PARK! Meet Linda Sue Park (https://lindasuepark.com/), the Newbery Medal award winning author of A Single Shard. Linda Sue will be at the bookshop to meet and chat with our readers, sign some books, and maybe even read a passage or two from her many works.

Nov. 11, 2023 3 PM Justin Murphy

JUSTIN MURPHY! Veteran education reporter for The Democrat and Chronicle, Justin Murphy (https://justinmurphywriter.com/) will be here to talk about his new book, Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger (Cornell Univ. Press 2022, https://bit.ly/justin-murphy-book), a pioneering and comprehensive historical recounting of racial segregation in Rochester and the city’s schools, and how this legacy of discrimination still exists in Rochester today.

Nov. 11, 2023 5 PM Shibani Mahtani, Tim McLaughlin & Albert Wan

SHIBANI MAHTANI & TIM MCLAUGHLIN! Shibani (Washington Post) and Tim (The Atlantic) are journalists who reported from the front lines during the 2019 Hong Kong protests.. They will be at the bookshop to chat with Bleak House Books’ co-owner, Albert Wan, about their new book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future for Global Democracy (Hachette 2023, https://amongthebraves.com/).  This event will be live streamed via Facebook Live (Bleak House Books).

Nov. 11, 2023 7 to 9 PM Afterparty: Live Music, Food and Drinks featuring Kenneth Kam, guitarist/lutenist

THE AFTERPARTY! After a long day of events and conversation, let’s unwind with some live music, food and drinks! Hong Kong-born, Rochester-based guitarist and lutenist, Kenneth Kam (https://www2.naz.edu/school-music/faculty-staff/kenneth-kam), will be playing an eclectic mix of music as guests munch on some yummy food prepared by our local eateries, including Four Seasons 四季樓 (HF-L), Route 96 BBQ (Victor), Basha (Brighton), and Sweet & Cute (HF-L). Refreshments will be served.

When Susi first asked me to give this talk it was at the bookshop during its last days, after I had announced that Bleak House Books would be closing for good. Susi came to the bookshop for one last visit and I was there doing bookshop stuff. She told me about her involvement with Peace Generation and how she thought it would be interesting to get the perspective of a bookseller on the subject of peace. I’m not sure I saw the connection back then and my thought actually was that Susi was feeling sorry for me about having to close the bookshop. And that was the real reason she had asked me to give this talk. 

But it turned out that she was serious, and a few weeks later both Susi and Fiona gave me a thoughtful online presentation about Peace Generation — its story, its mission, and also some of the challenges they thought Peace Generation might face in attracting an audience in Hong Kong today. I listened. I asked a few questions. And I made one or two points of my own. At the end I thanked them both for being so generous with their time and their hearts. 

That I’m here today means that I did at some point agree to give this talk. But I’m still not sure I see the connection between bookselling and peace. In fact, if you really want to know, I’m only here for the free beer. IS THERE FREE BEER? 

Before I became a bookseller, I was a lawyer. Being a lawyer taught me about the importance and the power of storytelling. I mostly handled cases involving civil rights or human rights violations. And the people who came to me for help because of these issues always had stories to tell about how and why they felt they were wronged in some way. My job as a lawyer for the clients whose cases I took up was to tell their stories for them to people who had the power and ability to make things right: an opposing attorney, a judge, a jury, a government official, or even a complete stranger. 

So I am going to start today’s talk with a story. Unlike the stories I used to tell on behalf of my clients, this one doesn’t have to do with anyone I know personally. Nor am I asking for anything in return for telling this story, except perhaps for your patience and ten minutes of your time. In other words, I hope you don’t fall asleep so early in my talk. 

The story I want to tell has to do with the text of today’s talk which is Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. It is a story about struggle, compassion, violence, and, of course, peace.

First a bit of geographical and historical background. Birmingham, where Dr. King wrote his letter, is a city in the state of Alabama, which is in the southern part of the United States, a region some Americans might refer to as the ‘Deep South’. Alabama is one of several states in the Deep South that has a long history of racism against blacks.

In the late 1950’s, more and more black Americans and some white Americans as well, began speaking out about the troubling wave of racist policies and violence that had then become the norm in many places in the United States. What started as sporadic and discrete acts of protest by individuals and small groups eventually grew into a broad, well-organized national movement which sought to create a society in which blacks would have the same rights and freedoms that whites have always enjoyed. The movement had many supporters and leaders with Dr. King being the most famous of those individuals. 

One of the things people in the movement did to challenge and potentially overturn racist laws and policies that were on the books at that time was to organise and attend peaceful, nonviolent protests. Often these protests involved actions in which the protestors would openly yet peacefully defy laws that were not only racist on their face — for example, a law that prohibited blacks from eating at the same lunch counter as whites — but also defy laws that were racist in the way they were applied — for example when the police refuse to give a permit for a protest march claiming it is unsafe but really because they disagree with the message or politics championed by the protestors. 

In April 1963 Dr. King helped organize a large protest movement in Birmingham, Alabama, with the specific goal of forcing the city’s private businesses — its department stores, restaurants, barber shops, etc — to repeal their racist policies against blacks. At that time Birmingham was known throughout the United States as being one of the most segregated and racist cities in the country. And the grand strategy was that if Dr. King could achieve even a modest victory in Birmingham, it would go a long way toward changing the laws and cultures in other American cities. 

The campaign would consist of a series of public direct actions like marches, boycotts and other activities that hopefully would call the nation’s and also the world’s attention to Birmingham’s racist treatment of blacks. 

But Dr. King and his allies faced many challenges in Birmingham. There was Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, the city’s notoriously powerful, arrogant, combative and racist head of public safety who controlled the police and fire departments among others. A number of Birmingham residents, some otherwise sympathetic to the civil rights cause, also disliked the fact that people like Dr. King, who did not live or work in Birmingham, were coming to their fair city to conduct potentially disruptive and violent demonstrations.

It was no surprise then that when the campaign eventually got under way in Birmingham it was met with fierce resistance by city officials and residents alike. Protestors who marched in the streets were brutally attacked by bystanders and racist thugs, while police officers either turned a blind eye or were ordered by their superiors not to respond at all to the attacks. Black protestors who peacefully insisted on service at businesses with racist policies — a tactic known as a ‘sit-in’ — were denied service and in some cases cursed at and spat upon. ‘Bull’ Connor issued orders that saw police use attack dogs and firefighters water cannons on protestors, many of them school age children. 

For Dr. King, the decisive moment in the Birmingham campaign came when city officials applied for and received a court injunction that prohibited further protests in the city. Dr. King and his trusted friend and ally Ralph David Abernathy had already planned to attend a protest march in a show of solidarity with fellow civil rights protestors when the injunction was issued. And with this new law on the books, Dr. King risked immediate arrest if he went ahead with his plan to attend the march. 

The big question was whether Dr. King would disobey the injunction by sticking to his original plan to attend the march. At first the answer seemed obvious: yes. To Dr. King, the injunction was the product of an overly compliant court perpetuating an unjust system. So in violating the injunction, Dr. King would, in effect, be furthering the cause of the civil rights movement. It would be the kind of civil disobedience that Dr. King preached about and put into practice so often during his adult life. 

But the path of civil disobedience involved a greater risk than just a few nights in jail for Dr. King.  After the court issued its injunction, news broke that the movement had run out of money with which to bail out the hundreds of protestors who were already behind bars, many of whom were arrested on spurious charges. Dr. King was one of the few people who could change that. He was famous, he was eloquent, he was by then a household name. And if anyone could raise the funds necessary to bail out the protestors it was Dr. King. But he wouldn’t be able to do any of that sitting in jail. At the same time, other protesters and allies who were not in jail waited eagerly to march with Dr. King on the streets of Birmingham which he promised them he would do.

Dr. King was, at that moment, what you would describe as a person between a rock and a hard place. If he stayed away from the march he would be seen as weak and even hypocritical. But if he marched and got arrested he wouldn’t be able to help the many protestors who went to jail on his watch. A meeting was called with 24 other civil rights leaders and allies at the famous Gaston Motel, a black-owned business and central meeting place for leaders of the Birmingham campaign. Dr. King himself recalled in his book ‘Why We Can’t Wait’ the moment when he had to decide what to do and this is what he wrote:

I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt, with two dozen others in the room. There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face to face with himself. I was alone in that crowded room.

I walked to another room in the back of the suite, and stood in the center of the floor. I think I was standing also at the center of all that my life had brought me to be. I thought of the twenty-four people, waiting in the room. I thought of the three hundred, waiting in prison. I thought of my Birmingham Negro community, waiting. Then my mind leaped beyond the Gaston Motel, past the city jail, past city lines and state lines, and I thought of twenty million black people who dreamed that someday they might be able to cross the Red Sea of injustice and find their way to the promised land of integration and freedom. There was no more room for doubt.

I pulled off my shirt and pants, got into work clothes and went back to the other room to tell them I had decided to go to jail.

“I don’t know what will happen; I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

From the essay New Day in Birmingham, collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. 72-73 (Signet Books 1964).

Dr. King made this decision on the morning of Good Friday and later that day he joined fifty other protestors on the streets of downtown Birmingham. They held hands, they marched, they sang. After walking seven or eight blocks Dr. King and the rest of the protestors were arrested under the orders of ‘Bull’ Connor, Birmingham’s racist chief of police. All the protestors were carted off to the Birmingham city jail, including Dr. King. And that is where Dr. King penned his famous letter. 

The story of Dr. King’s letter doesn’t end there though. Because Dr. King wasn’t just any prisoner. He was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the civil rights movement. And so ‘Bull’ Connor had to make an example out of him, and he ordered that Dr. King be placed in solitary confinement, where he would be cut off entirely from the outside world. 

If you’ve read the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ you know that Dr. King actually wrote the letter as a response to something. This something was also a letter, but not one addressed directly to Dr. King. It was an ‘open letter’ signed by 8 Birmingham religious leaders and published the day after Dr. King was arrested as a full page ad in The Birmingham News, the city’s leading newspaper. In their open letter the religious leaders criticised the tactics and the timing of the recent demonstrations in Birmingham, organized and led in part by Dr. King himself.

Because Dr. King was in solitary confinement there was no way he would have seen this open letter. He didn’t even have access to his lawyers let alone newspapers. Someone though managed to smuggle a copy of The Birmingham News into the jail for Dr. King. Whoever this person was, he or she would end up changing the course of history. 

After Dr. King read the ‘open letter’ something clicked in him. He was like a man possessed. He had to respond. Some way, somehow. He didn’t have any writing paper. He didn’t have any books or notes to which he could refer. All he had was the smuggled newspaper and his own wits. So he started to draft a response on the newspaper itself, writing in the margins and in any blank space he could find. When he filled up the newspaper, he switched to writing on any piece of scrap paper he could find. Toilet paper, paper towels, and eventually paper scraps and a pad of paper that Clarence Jones, a lawyer for Dr. King, smuggled into the jail. 

Every single piece of paper scrap that Dr. King wrote on was in turn smuggled out of the jail, also by Jones. And they eventually ended up in the hands of two people: Wyatt Walker and Willie Pearl Mackey, both allies of Dr. King. It was Ms Mackey’s job to transcribe all of Dr. King’s paper scraps that crossed her desk, at least the ones she could read. She worked night and day, sometimes to the point of complete exhaustion, to decipher, assemble and type up what Dr. King wrote. On April 16, 1963 the letter was finally finished. Some 7,000 words, twenty-one, double-spaced, typed pages. Dr. King left the Birmingham city jail on April 20, 1963. 

Five years later, on April 4, 1968, a racist by the name of James Earl Ray armed with a high powered rifle, fired a single bullet into the head of Dr. King, killing him. Dr. King was 39 years old at the time. 

When I selected Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail as the text for this talk I didn’t know any of the story behind how the letter came about. I knew generally of the history of the civil rights movement that Dr. King helped lead, but there were many details about the movement that I had either forgotten about or just didn’t know at all until now. In re-reading the letter and piecing together the story behind it, I cannot help but think about Hong Kong, and how many people here, including myself, experienced our own version of the civil rights movement. We experienced it with our bodies. We experienced it with our minds. And we experienced it with our souls. 

I know what you all might be thinking to yourselves now, or maybe you’re whispering to your neighbor this very thought as it occurs to you: “he said ‘experienced’! But it’s not over yet!” And you might be right. Who in their right mind would think that a social movement involving millions of people can be so easily snuffed out only after a few months or perhaps a year of activity and protest? 

One of the criticisms leveled against Dr. King which he adamantly rejected and specifically responded to in his famous letter from jail, had to do with time and tactics; the criticism being that Dr. King was acting rashly and even irresponsibly in trying to force the hand of the city by taking his case to the streets instead of to more official forums like the courts. If I’m not mistaken some people made a similar criticism in relation to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. 

If I may I would like to share with everyone some of what Dr. King wrote in response to this criticism. 

First, with respect to the criticism about tactics —

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creating the tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

from Letter From a Birmingham Jail collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., pp. 78-79 (Signet Books 1964).

That was Dr. King responding to those who disagreed with his use of public protest and civil disobedience as tools for social change. 

Now here he is responding to the criticism that he was being impatient in not waiting for lawmakers or judges to act. 

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make the real promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

from Letter From a Birmingham Jail collected in Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., pg. 86 (Signet Books 1964).

Reading and thinking about this now in the context of Hong Kong I am of the feeling that some of what Dr. King wrote in his letter might not apply to the Hong Kong of today. We must remember that during Dr. King’s time and the time of the civil rights movement, the United States was still mostly a democracy. By that I mean a country with a government whose priority was responding to and caring for its people rather than amassing and maintaining power. 

It was a time when activists did go to the courts to overturn racist laws, and sometimes won. It was a time when presidents, personally and through their use of federal resources, intervened in the affairs of state and local governments that were reluctant and unwilling to change their racist ways, even when the laws ordered them to. It was a time when lawmakers worked hand in hand with civilians to craft laws for the greater good of the nation rather than for the pocketbook of the businessman. 

And so when Dr. King wrote his letter from the city jail and called for more not less direct-action to force the kind of ‘constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth’, he was operating under two, not unrealistic assumptions: one, that the people responsible for creating this kind of tension were very much in harm’s way, AND two, that these people had allies inside the existing power structure who would be willing to enter the fray on their behalf in the event all hell broke loose. 

In Hong Kong today there are still many people who could be considered in harm’s way but I imagine that no official in a position of power would be willing to go to bat for any of them. 

Does this mean that Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail has nothing to teach those in Hong Kong who are hoping to find a peaceful resolution to what ails the city now and in the future? No. Many who read the letter will certainly see it as a political and tactical playbook for how to challenge the status quo. Much like the ‘The Power of the Powerless’, the famous essay by the late writer and first president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. 

But also like Havel’s book, Dr. King’s letter is more than just a how-to manual. It is a document of faith, of love, of hope. It is a document that rejects the cynicism of the many who believe that the best and only kind of change is the change in one’s bank account. It is a document that would give a lawyer the courage and reason to turn over a new leaf and become a bookseller in a city he’s never lived or worked in. It is a document that can turn an otherwise ordinary bookshop into an extension of one’s home, a place of warmth and love, and one that can provide a fellow booklover and dear friend with what this person has described as ‘the best job in the world’. 

In other words, the Letter from Birmingham Jail is exactly the kind of document that Dr. King set out to write. It changed my life in the best ways, both big and small, and I think it might do the same for you. 

Following tearful embraces and goodbyes, Albert ushers everyone from the bookstore at 7:45 p.m., closes the door and hangs a sign on it that reads, “Hong Kong is my home.”

by Lok-Kei SUM 沈諾基*; translated from the Chinese by Mary King BRADLEY**; cover photo by Chun-Tung LAM 林振東/ reprinted with the permission of Initium Media 端傳媒 (25 October 2021 | Hong Kong)

Every three months, Reena receives three or four books selected for her by bookshop owner Albert Wan. She belongs to the Bleak House Books subscription readers’ club. Last Christmas, Reena’s boss gave one-year memberships to five employees, including Reena.

She happened to be in the office when the first package arrived several days later, delivering what felt like all the excitement of another Christmas. “Everyone had a box, individualized [for him or her. You could see that] a lot of thought went into it,” she says.

Like the name Bleak House Books, the name for the store’s mail-order subscription service, Pickwick Club, was inspired by the works of English author Charles Dickens. 

Pickwick Club offered just three genres: mystery and suspense, general fiction, and young adult. But Reena, who works in writing and publishing, is especially fond of fiction for 8- to 12-year-olds, and so she emailed Bleak House Books to request that type of book. “I’m not very good at following the rules, so I changed them,” says Reena with a laugh.

Reena received one book from Bleak House Books, The Wild Robot, that particularly appealed to her. In this highly imaginative fantasy, a robot is shipwrecked on a remote island and becomes the adoptive mother of a goose.

Reena is full of praise for the subscription boxes from Bleak House Books, which have always contained at least one book that hit the bullseye and often included unknown titles by authors she hadn’t heard of. Even if she had gone to the bookstore herself, she says, she might not have been as equally successful at finding so many books that she enjoys.

It was almost a year before Reena first set foot in the San Po Kong bookstore, her reason for doing so its imminent closure. Albert’s decision to return to the United States with his family after the abrupt changes in Hong Kong’s political environment had left him no choice: he would have to close Hong Kong’s only remaining independent English bookstore.

“I wanted to ask them, what’s your secret? How do you know which books I want to read? Can you teach me to do the same thing for myself?” says Reena. She is losing not only books she would never otherwise encounter, but a bookseller who understands her.

Four Chances to Get It Right

Albert says that if only one person experienced a new book or author through Pickwick Club, he considers it a success. “Please keep reading, my friends,” he tells them.

Albert’s parents are Hongkongers, but he was born in the United States after they emigrated there in the 1970s. Originally a literature major, he transferred to the business college of another university, where he switched to studying finance. He realized the financial industry didn’t suit him only after he began working in the field, and it was then that he began his law studies. Afterwards, he became a defense lawyer, living, working, and adding to his family in cities such as New York and Atlanta.

When his wife, Jenny, found a teaching position in Hong Kong in 2017, Albert brought their two children to the city and started Bleak House Books as an online bookstore. After months of lugging books to markets of all sizes, Albert and his wife decided they had enough capital saved to open a brick-and-mortar store. It didn’t take long for them to find a unit on the 27th floor of an industrial building in San Po Kong.

Albert says that from the moment he saw the place, he liked both its looks and its light, and that he immediately decided to rent it—that was in October 2018. “San Po Kong … seems spacious, compared to many other places in Hong Kong,” he comments.

In good weather, summer sunlight does indeed penetrate the somewhat dirty air of this industrial neighborhood to seep into Bleak House Books, where the new and used books arranged on more than twenty bookcases exude a soothing smell. A piece of Chinese calligraphy that translates as “fine prospects” is tacked up in a corner of the window. All of these details form a magical moment in which reality and a world of books are inseparable.

It was a deliberate choice not to let the book shop become a “hoarder’s paradise,” says Albert. He hoped that readers who came to browse could sit in comfort for a while, without having to worry that a tower of books might topple onto their heads at any moment. A reading corner inside the store, designed especially for kids, features a rug and bean bag chairs.

When Reena is mentioned, store owner Albert laughs and refers to her as a “tough customer,” one who not only demands the unusual, but who also sends a message to tell him when the store has sent her books she doesn’t like. He says that there’s no real trick to selecting books for other people. It just requires a bit of time and taking note of how the other person reacts. “I figure, you have four chances to get it right, so … [laughs] if you fuck it up the first two times, you know, you’ll hear from them and you can tweak it,” he says.

Before Bleak House Books closed, Pickwick Club had approximately 20 members, which means Albert selected several hundred books for them over the course of a year. Busy at work, he had time to read only one book each month, so he saw making the selections as an opportunity to engage with new books and authors. This month he will send out this year’s fourth—and final—installment of Pickwick Club books ahead of schedule.

Tucked into the boxes is Albert’s farewell message to readers, thanking them for their faith in Bleak House Books and love of reading. In his message, he says that if only one person experienced a new book or author through Pickwick Club, he considers it a success. “Please keep reading, my friends,” he tells them.

Albert says the saddest part of leaving is that he can no longer maintain the same sincere, close relationship with his readers. For Albert, his wife, and kids, the book store is an extension of their family. It’s not uncommon to see his kids at the store, and his wife Jenny, an associate professor of humanities, also visits the store from time to time. With the addition of employees and regular customers, they are all one big family.

“I can’t say our relationship is being severed, but it is going to be more attenuated.”

Running a Bookstore Is Asking for Trouble…

“Even though we were just a stupid bookstore, [I wanted] people to come into this space and have them feel safe and at peace.”

An independent Hong Kong bookstore closing is nothing new, although Bleak House Books is a rare example of one that is closing for reasons other than financial problems. On August 29, Bleak House Books posted “The Last Memo” on social media, announcing it was about to close. “Given the state of politics in Hong Kong, Jenny and I can no longer see a life for ourselves and our children in this city,” wrote Albert.

Later, he adds that the family’s main struggle in regard to leaving Hong Kong has been choosing when, not “if.” Just as Jenny has responsibilities to her university community, Albert must ensure that the bookstore’s staff has enough time to deal with Bleak House Books closing. “It’s not any one thing, it’s everything, really, and most of it has to do with politics,” he says. 

Albert acknowledges that the United States, where they will shortly return, also has serious problems. “But at the end of the day, despite all the limitations and false fronts, there’s a type of freedom there that doesn’t exist in Hong Kong anymore.”

Although nothing the family does on a daily basis has any direct relation to politics, in “The Last Memo” Albert writes: “As George Orwell once remarked, ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues.’” The bookstore hasn’t stopped doing business as a result of this, however. In its final days, box after box of new books has been delivered.

Asked if anyone had offered to take over the bookstore, Albert says, “Who the fuck wants to run a bookshop now? I mean, you’re just asking for trouble, right?” He simply hopes that one day he can hang up the Bleak House Books sign again in the United States.

Even so, he says that running Bleak House Books has been the perfect combination of physical and mental labor. From pulling a cart piled high with packages to the post office in summertime heat, to sitting at his desk and pondering how to market a book, it has all given this bookseller immeasurable satisfaction.

“I don’t regret anything, I would think that this was probably the best thing to have happened to me,” Albert says. “The bookshop has kept me going. During the toughest times during the past few years, it has given me hope.”

Bleak House Books was a clear supporter of the 2019 anti-extradition movement, stocking numerous titles on democratic movements and human rights during that period. “It felt like we had an important job to do, even though we are just a stupid bookshop, to have this space for people to come to and feel like they’re safe and at peace,” Albert says. “You felt like everything mattered a little more, even if it didn’t matter in the end, you just felt like you had to do something.”

Later, during the pandemic, Albert closed the bookstore twice. Fortunately, the mail order sales established online in the bookstore’s early days picked up at the same time, which kept Bleak House Books going. Albert describes Bleak House Books as a financially healthy and happy bookstore right up to the end. “I never thought it would be politics that would drive us to leave [Hong Kong],” says Albert. “The bookshop is more a casualty of our decision [to go].”

Sending a Book “Inside”

“This isn’t just about a book. The truth is that no one in Hong Kong is immune to what’s going on here.” Even if no one you know has gone to prison, those who have aren’t so far removed from us.

Two weeks after Bleak House Books announced it was closing, the store received a letter from a Hong Kong prison. This was when Albert first learned that a book from his personal collection, given to a reader, had made its way into the hands of Jane, serving a prison sentence for a case related to the anti-extradition movement.

That reader was Jane’s former tutor; the book, the tutor’s favorite novel, Beloved by Toni Morrison. He had given Albert’s old copy to Jane after her arrest. But because the pages contained Albert’s handwritten notes, Jane couldn’t take the book into the prison with her, to keep her company during her three-year sentence.

“I was very sad knowing that I won’t be able to visit Bleak House Books even after I got out in 2024. I wonder what Hong Kong will become after three years, better or worse,” Jane wrote in her letter. “Maybe one day, I will be able to walk into your bookshop again, in somewhere else, in another time.”

This is how a book connects Albert, who once took a college literature course in the United States, with a Hong Kong girl he has never met, who was imprisoned for a 2019 social movement. The same paperback novel touched several lives before returning to Bleak House Books as a letter.

After sharing the story, Albert repeats again and again that this is “very sad.” “It’s not just about a book. The truth is that no one in Hong Kong is immune to what’s going on here.” Even if no one you personally know has gone to prison, those who have aren’t so far removed from us.

Albert never thought he would receive a letter like this after he became a bookseller: “I used to get letters from people in jail because I was a lawyer, they needed my help.” Albert says what he could do was to write back to Jane and arrange to send her a clean copy of Beloved that would pass the prison inspection.

Recalling his days as a defense lawyer, Albert says the job taught him the power of stories and the written word. He discovered that telling a persuasive story during a trial had the power more or less to shape a person’s future. But over time, he also came to see that the American legal system was dictated by money and had an undemocratic aspect.

Albert chose to give his bookstore the same name as the book by Dickens because what the author says about the law in Bleak House agrees in many respects with Albert’s experiences. “The legal system has issues in general that make it a less than ideal vehicle for social change,” he says, and gives the example of abortion rights. U.S. law has already weighed in, but that hasn’t ended the longstanding “culture war” or attempts to restrict women’s access to abortion in many states.

“There are lots of ways to instigate social revolution. This bookshop is one of them … it’s a small store, but what we do changes this community,” says Albert.

A Safe Space Away from a Pandemic and Politics

Both women think it’s very difficult to find a good English bookstore in Hong Kong. For a city that has branded itself as a “World City,” this is truly incredible.

During Bleak House Book’s final days, many people heard the news that it was closing and came to the store for the first time. An 82-year-old retired engineer, for example, made a special trip in search of a book about Marx. Unfortunately, he was unable to find one. There were also customers like Mrs. Hui, who first discovered that Hong Kong had a book store like Bleak House Books when she read in the newspaper that it was about to close. Several people chose not to buy books, and instead left the store with old maps of Hong Kong and post cards. 

“Latecomers” included the Indian ladies Schoanna and Vedika. As kids they would frequently spend an entire afternoon together at an English bookstore, sitting on the floor to read. “So it feels really odd that we have to rack our brains to find an English bookstore, we’re really at a loss,” says Vedika. The pair finally found Bleak House Books through a friend’s recommendation. 

The large English-language bookstore chains in Hong Kong, such as Page One, have closed down one by one, leaving only the bookstores and book fairs focused primarily on Chinese books for the mainstream market. These places don’t suit Schoanna and Vedika’s needs. Schoanna, however, has always refused to buy books online or switch to e-books. “I need to see it and smell it,” she said. Only when she has it in her hands can she feel if a book is right for her.

Now, every time Schoanna returns to India or travels outside the city, she brings back a pile of English books. Vedika agrees that buying books online is more of a “procedure” and that it’s easy to be swayed by reviews. Hong Kong’s brick-and-mortar bookstores carry only the more popular English books, however, with no shelf space for new or smaller authors. Both women think it’s very difficult to find a good English bookstore in Hong Kong. For a city that has branded itself as a World City, this is truly incredible.

There are also regular customers like Major, who stop by the store every few weeks. Major, who lives in the area, describes Albert as “quite the character” and admires the storeowner’s attention to current affairs and his outspoken style on social media. “Nowadays there aren’t as many opportunities to disengage and browse through such a sea of books.”

In the past, Major has scavenged for treasure in the boxes labeled “Name Your Own Price,” unearthing masterpieces like Fahrenheit 451 and Catcher in the Rye. For him, Bleak House Books is a safe space where the pandemic and politics can’t find him for a while.

A Common Devotion

“If you’re looking for inspiration and hope for a brighter future though I have just the thing for you.”

After several weekends of the store having been crowded to capacity, the last night for Bleak House Books finally arrived on October 15th. Readers had “looted” the store over the past several days, leaving gaping holes in the store’s twenty-plus bookcases taller than a person. Second-hand paperback books usually kept in crates were moved to the shelves to fill in the gaps. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have said we’d donate whatever books were left. All the books are gone,” Albert says afterwards.

The roughly 900-square-foot space was packed with readers. Some obviously didn’t find what they had in mind, but still took a book to the counter to make one last purchase. Albert’s entire family and four shop assistants were all there. They had booked a table at a nearby restaurant, to share a meal with friends after Albert wrapped up the store closing.

Although the bookstore would no longer be in business at Halloween, the store still managed to sneak in this annual tradition. On the last day, its interior was decorated with skeletons, pumpkins, and bats. Custom candy boxes inscribed with “Bleak House Books” sat next to the counter.

When the hour set for the doors to close came at last, several dozen people remained, quietly watching the store’s owner and employees, unwilling to leave. Albert told them he had nothing else to say, and asked with a wry smile, “Why are you still here? Go home.”

No one said anything, but their answer was loud and clear.

Following a round of tearful embraces and goodbyes, Albert ushered everyone from the bookstore at 7:45, closed the door and hung a sign on it that read, “Hong Kong is my home.”

Albert and the others sat down to eat at last, an hour late.

During the interview, Albert mentions several times that he loves to write. He personally managed all of the Bleak House Books social media posts, which often took the form of diary entries about the day-to-day running of the store, or which reflected his thoughts on recent events.

If you want to find the roots of Bleak House Books, however, you might have to dig a little deeper.

On November 8, 2016, Albert posted a final article to his personal blog Invisible Man. He wrote that he would be moving abroad and closing down his law practice, and would therefore no longer be updating his blog about criminal defense and civil rights.

On the day of the U.S. presidential election, before any of the results had been released, he wrote, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned writing for this blog over the past seven years it’s that change—in perspectives, in policies, and in humanity—comes slowly if at all. Worse yet not all of that change is of the positive sort.”

It’s possible that after Albert wrote that post, he, like many others, experienced profound heartbreak over the final election results, then soon to come. But before any of that happened, he offered this piece of advice to the reader of his blog:

If you’re looking for inspiration and hope for a brighter future though I have just the thing for you. It’s the text of a speech given [at Central Park in 1944] by one of the greatest jurists to have graced the bench of the federal courts. His name is Learned Hand, and this is [how Judge Hand began his] speech, entitled ‘The Spirit of Liberty’:

‘We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion.’

It’s possible that even now, another idea is starting to take shape in Albert’s mind: an idea that involves another bookstore. A bookstore that is independent, with an edge, and awash in a good, soothing light.

***

* Sum Lok-kei is an independent journalist in Hong Kong. He is interested in politics and culture, particularly where they intersect.

** Mary King Bradley is a freelance editor and translator. Her recent translations include essays for the Hong Kong bilingual anthology Writing in Difficult Times and a series of diary essays by Law Lok-man in the Mekong Review. A personal essay is forthcoming in an English anthology, Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art. She lives in Hong Kong.

I don’t have a poem to read. But I would like to read this short statement. It is for everyone here and everyone who can’t be here today but who have sent us messages of support or have visited the bookshop since I announced that it would be closing. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to speak or write back to you all individually. Angel, my wonderful shop manager, tells me everyone deserves a response, and she is right. So this is what I would like to say in reply. 

If there’s one thing Hong Kong has taught me during the few years I’ve lived and had the bookshop here, it is that I now know what is possible. What’s possible that is good, and what’s possible that is bad. I would like to think that this bookshop represents the former — that is, the possible of what is good. 

Even though I might be the person people think of when they think of Bleak House Books, I am not the sole reason the bookshop is what it is today. What you see here tonight and what we have all seen happen since I announced that Bleak House Books would be closing — the messages, the crowds, the tears — is a reflection of something very human and very fundamental. Some might call it love. Some might call it defiance. Some might call it art. But whatever it is exactly it is something that we created and nurtured together, as family, as friends, as a community. And it is good. We all know that, in our minds and in our hearts. And no one can ever take that away from us. No one. 

Because I promised that this would be a short statement I am afraid I will be breaking that promise if I start speaking about the possible of the bad. At least as it relates to Hong Kong of the past few years. Suffice it to say that we too know what that is and what it might be in the future. 

But just as we have been able to nurture the possible of the good together, we too must remember and face up to the possible of the bad together, wherever we might be or whatever we might end doing with our lives. 

Many people have thanked us for having the bookshop and for doing the work that we do. I can’t speak for the rest of the bookshop family, but I’ve never done it for the thanks. If anything, giving life to Bleak House Books has become my way of thanking Hong Kong for being so good to me and my family. And so if there’s anyone who should be saying ‘thank you’ it should be me. 

 好多謝大家咁多年啲支持同埋關心. 我哋永遠唔會忘記你地. 香港人加油!

How does one go about shuttering a happy, thriving and successful bookshop? This is a question that has been plaguing me for some time now. 

From the very beginning, my goal for Bleak House Books has been a modest one: to build a viable, self-sustaining, community-oriented bookshop on my terms. Four years later I can say that I have achieved that goal, thanks in part to the persistence and efforts of my wonderful bookshop family and also to the support of our readers and the community. 

So it is with great sadness that I need to announce that Bleak House Books will be closing. The last day the bookshop will be open to the public will be Friday, 15 October 2021, and the last day we will fulfill online orders placed with us will be Friday, 1 October 2021. 

The decision to close the bookshop follows another equally painful and sad decision, which is that my family and I will be leaving Hong Kong in the near future. As much as I would prefer not to have to disclose this in a public announcement, I believe I have a responsibility to the people who support the work that we do here at Bleak House Books to be honest and transparent about the reason for why I need to close the bookshop. 

The backdrop to these developments is, of course, politics. To be sure, what my wife Jenny, my kids, and I do in our daily lives is not overtly political. Jenny is a university professor, I sell books, and the kids are primary school students. But as George Orwell once remarked, ‘[i]n our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues.’ This observation is as true today as it was in 1940 when Orwell first made it. And given the state of politics in Hong Kong, Jenny and I can no longer see a life for ourselves and our children in this city, at least in the near future. 

Some of you might be wondering why I decided to close the bookshop rather than sell or find someone else to run it. There’s no single answer to that question. Bleak House Books is an independent bookshop. And like any other independent bookshop, it has its own unique character, voice and mission. It is my preference to keep it that way. Also, to hand the reins over now after only four years of bookselling seems a bit premature to me. There are many things I still want to do and say, and of course, many more books I’d still like to share with everyone. 

My immediate concern for the next month-and-a-half will be keeping Bleak House Books open until the very last minute of the very last day for our readers, our community and Hong Kong. We have some fun stuff planned, so it’s not all doom and gloom from here on out. 

I recently put in a large order for new books — our last — that has brought to the bookshop some old favorites, special selections from our resident and far-flung bookworms, and also the random selection from Ye Olde Bookseller for which Angel, my trusty shop manager, will invariably tell me: ‘but no one’s going to buy that, boss!’ We will also have one last poetry reading with our good friends at Cha literary journal, the theme for which is ‘LOVE’.  And maybe I’ll finally break down and buy a beer fridge so I can have the proverbial ‘last beer’ with anyone who wants to have one with me at the bookshop before it closes. 

There will, however, be no farewell party, and no clearance sale. For those books we have left at the bookshop and in storage after the last day we will donate most of them to any independent bookshop or local institution that wants them. We will make sure our Pickwick Club subscribers and readers who have placed special orders with us get the books they are supposed to get. And we will return all the books given to us for sale on consignment back to their rightful owners.  

Having started this announcement with a question, it is perhaps fitting to end it with one as well, which is: what will happen to Bleak House Books after this? And my answer is: ‘I don’t know exactly’. We are living in uncertain, even dangerous times and for those reasons it is very hard to plan ahead. What I can promise everyone is that this is not the end. It is not the end of Bleak House Books. It is not the end of our journey. It is not the end of anything really. 

I was asked by a friend what I will miss most about Hong Kong when I leave. Strangely I couldn’t articulate to her what those things might be even though I knew I would miss a lot of things about this city. The truth is I don’t have the mental energy to ‘miss’ anything about Hong Kong yet because my focus is what I can do for the city here and now. Maybe there will come a time when I can spend a lazy afternoon thinking and reminiscing about what life was like in Hong Kong during this 大時代. But that time is not now. There is still a lot of work to be done and I intend to do as much of it as I can before my time here is up. 香港人，加油！

Originally published in Ming Pao on 12 April 2019 and reprinted here in full with the permission of the publisher

I know about a magical bookshop in Hong Kong. It’s on the island-side, so you can get there easily by your preferred mode of public transportation, but the best part of the journey there is the part that takes place on foot.

If you’re going by MTR, your first instinct when you exit the station may be to melt into the crowds. Don’t do that. There is a lot to see and you’ll miss it if you play it cool and join the herd.

Once you get your bearings, find a safe spot to plant yourself so you don’t get run over and stop to look around. You will catch glimpses of both old and new Hong Kong. On one street you might see traditional Hong Kong-style cafes serving familiar Cantonese fare adjacent to their newer, sleeker cousins of varying cuisines. On another, you might find a range of specialty shops — think handkerchiefs and plastic tarps — opened in an age when it was neither hip nor optional to operate such establishments.

The streets are narrow enough so that you know they weren’t designed with the automobile age in mind. Traffic signals are few and far between. Pedestrian crossings exist by way of subtle negotiations between the driver and walker rather than by marked signs.

I hope you’re in decent shape because you’ll have to negotiate a few steep stairways to get to the bookshop. Walking is serious, often sweaty business here in Hong Kong.

Once you get past the steep climbs, you will discover that the crowds and cars and bustle have all magically disappeared. Stretching in front of you will be one of several streets, almost certainly deserted and so quiet you will be able to hear yourself think again. Rather than busy storefronts and stalls you will see street art of the edgy and not-so-edgy variety.

You are close now. Walking down these eerily quiet streets you will feel like you’re floating down a jetway to a plane that is about to take you to your favourite vacation destination.

The bookshop is nestled at the end of a dead-end pedestrian side street, tucked away in an airy but cozy corner with chairs and tables arranged nicely in front. The corner is formed by a large stone and cement wall painted in a shade of pink. The wall shores up a large park that looms over the bookshop and gives it a kind of sanctuary effect one is more likely to find in a temple or a church than at a retail space.

When you step inside the bookshop you feel like you’ve stepped inside a home and not a store. It is the home of a person who not only loves books but also loves all the little things in life; ones that we take for granted all the time.

Look straight ahead and you’ll see a nicely appointed kitchen — coffee is made fresh to order — complete with a full size refrigerator in powder blue. Look to your right and you’ll see what might best be described as the ultimate picnic spread, not of food, but books, all personally curated by the owner and carefully set out. If you’re lucky the owner might be around but even if she isn’t you will find yourself in good hands with one of the bookshop’s many readers-turned-managers.

At first glance the shop might seem small. But there’s a pocket staircase leading up to a second floor. Mount it and you will find yourself in another room lined with more books and also a sunny seating area that overlooks the street below. An idyllic spot for reading, people watching, or both.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am describing the bookshop that is Mount Zero Books in Sheung Wan. It is the kind of bookshop that perhaps Ye Olde Bookseller would have opened up had he sold books in his past life. More importantly, however, it is the kind of bookshop that makes life worth living.

Today the resident bookworms at Bleak House Books will be “taking over” Mount Zero Books for the day so that we can finally experience the magic of Mount Zero Books for ourselves. And you, Dear Reader, are cordially invited to join us so that you too can see what the fuss is all about. We promise you won’t be disappointed.

Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers — journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

That is their peril.

Ours is of another sort.

How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.

We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writers is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the ‘safe,’ all but the state-approved art.

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly — a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure; incarceration in holding camps; prisons; or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is imperative not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overwhelmed by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films — that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

Last Saturday I stood before you and announced that the government would be suspending its efforts to pass the controversial extradition bill. I had hoped that this decision would temper the anger harbored by many Hong Kongers over the way the government had mishandled and in some cases ignored the objections raised by many interested parties against passage of the extradition law. I said then that rather than continue with our efforts to pass the bill, it was time to take a breather and step back to assess the situation.

On Sunday the public responded to my decision to suspend passage of the bill with still more protests. We saw Hong Kongers of all ages and from all walks of life exercise their freedoms, taking peacefully to the streets in record numbers to tell the government, and myself in particular, that they were still dissatisfied with the status quo.

I understand now that more needs to be done. Because the problem lies not simply in the extradition bill but in the differing visions of what Hong Kong will become ten, twenty years from now. For many Hong Kongers, especially among our youth, there exists a fear that the freedoms and rights they have enjoyed or have become accustomed to will be taken away from them as Hong Kong inches closer to the year when the guarantee of ‘one country, two systems’ will expire. That is a concern that this government, as the sole representative of the Hong Kong people, needs to address.

The government is not infallible. It is fundamentally a creation of human thought and human ideas. Laws that have, at one time, won the approval of the government and the public are sometimes revised or rescinded in their entirety because they lose their relevance or because they no longer reflect the values of contemporary society. So too people who were once elected or appointed to public office leave their posts because their policies and stances no longer reflect prevailing public norms. And that is as it should be in a democratic, transparent, and compassionate society like ours.

So today I announce that I will be resigning as Chief Executive. My vision of what Hong Kong should be or will be is not in line with that shared by many of my fellow Hong Kongers. And to try and push through the measures that I think are necessary to achieve this vision will only create more conflict, more bloodshed, and more hurt.

At this point in time it is appropriate and necessary for the people of Hong Kong, including our youth, to come together and to engage in a dialogue about what kind of Hong Kong they want to see in the future. It is a dialogue that will no doubt be fraught, contentious and painful. But it is one that needs to be had. Because only when we have a clear idea of the kind of Hong Kong we want will we be able to make the kinds of decisions and form the kinds of plans that we will need to realize that vision.

The spirit of Hong Kong is strong and it is just. I know that. You know that. And the world now knows that. Let us harness that spirit in unity and with mutual respect for one another as we work toward building a better, more hopeful future for Hong Kong.