The Renaissance of a Chinatown Bookshop

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll hear how a bookstore in Chinatown was brought back to life after a devastating fire. We’ll also meet the editor of a high school newspaper who became the subject of an article in the issue that came out last month.

Lucy Yu, owner of Yu & Me Books in Chinatown.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Yu & Me Books was the first bookstore in Manhattan to be owned by an Asian American woman when it opened in December 2021. It was heavily damaged little more than 18 months later — on the Fourth of July last year — when fire destroyed an apartment upstairs in the same building in Chinatown.

By the time the fire trucks left, Yu was already thinking about what it would take to reopen the store, even though a thousand books had been ruined and she had lost $60,000 in inventory. My colleague Jordyn Holman followed Yu’s struggles after the fire. I asked Jordyn to explain how she came across the story and why she found it meaningful. Here’s what she said:

“My editor noticed Yu’s GoFundMe campaign and, knowing that I’m an avid book lover, suggested that I reach out to Lucy, as I came to call her.

“I cover the retail industry, which usually means writing about big companies that most people have heard of like Walmart and Macy’s. But retailing is also made up of millions of small businesses that dot our neighborhoods. I figured that following Lucy’s story would be a way to give readers insight into the mind-set of an entrepreneur who had been forced to rewrite her original business plan.