Lifestyle
A bookstore too controversial for China finds home in D.C.
A customer browses titles at JF Books on September 17, 2024.
Maansi Srivastava for NPR
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
On a Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C., Yu Miao was busy preparing the first floor of his bookstore for a public lecture — an event that would be illegal in Shanghai, where his shop used to operate.
The lecture, titled “Rights and Privacy in the Digital Age,” featured Chinese American professor Minxin Pei and attracted a large audience from the local Chinese community — with many more on the waiting list.
Free speech restrictions in China compelled Yu to reopen his bookshop in the U.S. under a new name, JF Books. He had been forced to close the Shanghai branch of Jifeng Bookstore in 2018 after Chinese authorities refused to renew the shop’s lease and prevented him from finding a new location, even outside the city.
JF Books offers Chinese-language volumes from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, alongside English titles, with a focus on Chinese and Asian topics. Beyond hosting events on politics and human rights, the owner envisions it as a space for public discussions and readings, encouraging the D.C. community to meet new people, explore cultural and social issues and learn about China.
“If a reader steps into a bookstore and is moved by something, that joy is real,” Yu said. “When we attend lectures in both Chinese and English, we meet old and new friends. I want to host literary salons so people can connect, talk, and find support — a place to build spiritual connections.”
Finding a community space in D.C. is difficult unless it’s at a church or tied to a political group. Yu hopes his new shop will inspire readers to explore books in English that introduce Chinese traditions, politics, and daily life, helping them better understand the lives of ordinary people.
“The Chinese people are not their government — they are kind and want a better life, but they have no say,” he said.
Yu Miao is part of a growing wave of moderate Chinese emigrés who left the country amid Xi Jinping’s crackdown on free speech and the economic challenges following the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Why China’s moderates, like this bookstore owner, are leaving
Yu is part of a growing wave of moderate Chinese emigrés who left the country amid Xi Jinping’s crackdown on free speech and the economic challenges following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China had a relatively open public space where discussions coexisted with state laws. After his rise, this space quickly disappeared—and public engagement became a risk. One key supplier for JF Books is Zhang Shizhi, a Chinese publisher now based in Japan.
JF Books offers Chinese-language titles from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, along with a selection of English-language books.
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
“More people have left China over the past five years. It’s a confluence of events: the slowing economy, the fact that Xi won’t step down, and therefore no change in sight. All of this came to a head after the botched final phase of the Covid outbreak, when the government implemented strict lockdowns to control the virus instead of importing mRNA vaccines, which were being used in many other countries.” said Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future.
“They began to see it as not only harsh but also relatively incompetent,” he added.
“I knew making money from selling books would be tough, so my goal was to create a public space where we could keep the bookstore alive and create a place for people to learn and be curious together,” Yu said.
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The story of Jifeng bookstore
Founded in 1997 and long regarded as a staple in several Shanghai metro stations, Jifeng Bookstore became a cultural hub for the city’s liberal intelligentsia, building a strong reputation among both local and international scholars. At its peak, the chain had eight locations across the city.
Yu, now in his 50s, explained that changing reading habits and rising rents led him to shift the bookstore’s focus.
“I knew making money from selling books would be tough, so my goal was to create a public space where we could keep the bookstore alive and create a place for people to learn and be curious together,” he said.
Like most censorship in authoritarian regimes, harassment in China often occurs gradually and without formal documentation. For businesses, especially in recent years, this typically manifests as accusations that their lease has expired. And on social media platforms, censorship extends to self-censorship, as users restrict their own speech out of fear of reprisal.
In Yu’s experience, he had to cancel numerous events in public posts, as authorities would complain that a topic “is not good” or that a speaker “has a problem.” When Jifeng planned to host a lecture series titled “The Life and Death Lessons for Youth” — which aimed to explore perspectives on life and death through philosophy, religion, and literature — the authorities intervened, arguing that the lecture topic could mislead young people.
While higher rent may have worsened the difficulty of finding a new location, Yu believes the main reason for the bookstore’s closure was pressure from local authorities, who warned landlords against renting to him. He recalls being banned from all types of business activity from 2018 to 2019. After writing to Shanghai officials, the authorities met with him and explained that the bookstore’s intellectual events encouraged open discussions, which were seen as a threat to the regime.
“They didn’t have an issue with me personally, but with the bookstore as a concept,” Yu said.
In 2018, he moved to Florida with his wife and family, then relocated to D.C. to pursue studies in English language and literature. Still, the scrutiny from Chinese authorities continued to follow him. In August 2022, after a trip to see her ailing mother, his wife was barred from leaving China for more than eight months.
At the new D.C. location, the owner displays handwritten cards from people on one of the final days of Jifeng’s Shanghai operations.
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A new chapter
Major cities tend to have a bookstore that reflects their identities, and for Shanghai, that was Jifeng Bookstore – now part of the collective memory for those who lived there. At the new D.C. location, the owner displays handwritten cards from people on one of the final days of Jifeng’s Shanghai operations.
For Wenxuan Fang, a social media analyst from Virginia, stepping into the bookstore felt like déjà vu—a reminder of his childhood visits to the Shanghai store at the metro station, and a rare chance to find Chinese books in the U.S. He picked up a book on Persian merchants in Southern China and a poetry collection by Ha Jin.
“As someone from Taiwan, it’s hard to access books in simplified Chinese, especially on topics like Middle East studies, which are more commonly published in Mainland China. While China keeps publishing, the quality has declined with censorship,” he said.
Lei Zhou, a Chinese American who was born and raised in China, spent $300 on books at the store’s opening. For him and his community, “it’s the best of both worlds” because JF Books sells banned Chinese books while also offering access to the latest intellectual works from China, which are rarely marketed abroad.
Leaving home and starting a new bookstore from scratch comes with its own challenges. “The hardest part,” Yu said, “is setting up the business. I’m unfamiliar with the laws here, and much of the work requires lawyers and financial experts. Plus, I have to navigate everything in English.”
Yu hopes his new shop will inspire readers to explore books in English that introduce Chinese traditions, politics, and daily life, helping them better understand the lives of ordinary people.
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Maansi Srivastava for NPR
As Yu reflects on the years of silence and struggle that led him to open a new bookstore in a different country, he finds inspiration in one person: Yan Bofei, the founder of the now-closed Shanghai bookstore, who, in his 70s, still believes that bookstores play a vital public role.
“Every time we talk, I learn something new,” Yu said. “Despite everything he’s been through, Yan still cares deeply about the future of the people in China.”
The audio version of this piece was produced by Mansee Khurana and edited by Ashley Westerman. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
Karen McNenny is a certified divorce coach, certified co-parenting specialist and author of the book The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family.
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When Karen McNenny was facing divorce about 15 years ago, she was afraid of what it would mean for her future: despair, debt and a lifetime of resentment, she says.
At the same time, she was thinking of her two children, she says. She didn’t want their father to become her enemy.
So she and her former husband chose to approach divorce differently as a couple. “We’re going to renovate and transform this family. We’re not going to destroy it,” she says. “The marriage is ending, not your relationship.”
For McNenny, a mediator, certified divorce coach and certified co-parenting specialist, divorce is a tool, not a weapon. She expands on this concept in The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, which came out this spring. The book offers guidance on how to maintain compassionate and respectful ties with a former spouse while also healing and moving forward.
According to Pew Research Center, a third of Americans who have ever been married had a first marriage that ended in divorce. For that reason, McNenny hopes her book becomes a must-read for couples before they get married. “The best time to talk about divorce is before you need to talk about it,” she says.
She shared insights from her book in a conversation with Life Kit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is called The Good Divorce. What does that mean?
[For those with kids,] the good divorce is about protecting the future of the family while we dissolve the marriage.
After the paperwork is done and the assets have been divided, can you and your co-parent sit on the same side of the bleachers during the basketball game? Can you still see yourselves as a partnership, with the ability to have thoughtful conversations about your kids?
For those who don’t have kids, [the good divorce is] about protecting your health — your mental health and your physical health. If we are doubling down with resentment and bitterness, all of that gets stored in the body and shows up in different ways. You deserve a pathway that’s less destructive.
Let me also be clear: There are times when an amicable, collaborative process is not possible and maybe even inappropriate. For instance, where there’s active addiction, abuse, domestic violence, coercion or unmanaged mental health issues.
How do you get to a place where you don’t feel triggered by your partner, so you both can work together toward a good divorce?
That, my dear, does not happen overnight. That is more like a dimmer switch going up and down and up and down, and the gift of time helps to get there.
It’s a complex emotional journey because we do feel relief in walking away from our spouse and the challenges. But with it, there is extraordinary grief that comes with divorce that I think is often underestimated and undersupported.
If my spouse had died, people would’ve been checking in with me regularly. I never would’ve spent a holiday alone in that first year. There probably would’ve been a meal train.
But he didn’t die. My marriage died, my family structure died, my identity as a wife and a partner died. There’s so much grief through these transformations that come with divorce that we don’t see.
So supporting friends in all those ways that you would as if there had been an actual death is doing a lot for your friends who are going through divorce.
How do you let your friends, family and community know that you’re getting a divorce and that you might need support?
Put a communication strategy together. It’s not just for how we tell the kids. It’s also a communication strategy for the grandparents; to the circle of support around the kids, like teachers, coaches and mentors; and our shared community.
It’s extraordinary when a couple can write that message together, not unlike a marriage announcement. [You might say:] We’ve made a really difficult decision. We wanted to let you know. We’re not going to court. Don’t expect a battle. Please don’t ask us why. Just ask us how we’re doing. We’re on the same side as the kids. You don’t need to pick sides.
In doing so, we’ve given everyone the same information at once. It’s a unified message that comes from the parent team, and it allows your community to know how best to support you. And it takes out all the gossip and wonder about what is going on.
If you have kids and they’re splitting time between two homes, what are some ways to make that change easier for them?
Our kids were 5 and 7 when we divorced, so it was three or four nights at a time in each home. By the time they got to be about 8 or 10, it made sense to go a week in each residence. After COVID, the kids came to us and said, “Can we just have two weeks in a house? We wanna be able to settle in more.” [So we said] OK.
A lot of parents are so rigid about the schedule. There’s no flexibility. That doesn’t serve anyone. So I recommend liberating yourselves from the calendar and letting it grow and bend with your kids appropriately.
Knowing what you know now about divorce, what questions do you think couples should ask themselves before they get married?
So often when people arrive at the threshold of divorce, couples are like, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Get educated about the business part of it.
There is no harm in having a prenuptial agreement. Even if you decided not to file it, have the conversation about the implications. What does it mean if we buy this house together? What does it mean if one of us works more and one of us works less?
We also underestimate what it means to be roommates. What are your value systems around cooking and cleaning? How much alone time do you need? It’s easy to fall in love and not know if you’re compatible.
Do you think you’d get married again?
I absolutely hope that I get to say yes to a lifelong commitment with a partner, as I believe we often are given the opportunity to become a better version of ourself through partnership.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
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