Culture Shifters Oct. 21, 2024

Lucy Yu Is Redefining What A Bookstore Can Be

Written By Marina Fang Photography by Mary Kang

Yu & Me Books, located in the heart of Manhattan's Chinatown, has become a literary haven for immigrant authors and writers of color.

This profile is part of our Culture Shifters series, which highlights people who are changing the way we think about the world around us. To read about our other Culture Shifters, return to the list here .

As a bookstore owner, Lucy Yus brain is naturally full of book recommendations. As we walk down the stairs of her shop, Yu & Me Books, to a lounge area in the basement so we can sit and talk, I notice that along the staircase there are stacked copies of journalist Ava Chins Mott Street, waiting to be signed by the author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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