Love, death, and a book bar

The story of a Hangzhou bookstore named after a Martin Scorsese film / Edith Wharton novel.

I read poetry at the Hangzhou bookstore In a Cultural House (纯真年代 chúnzhēn niándài) last week. This is the story of its founders.

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Her belly was distended, intestines near rupture. She had a coin flip’s chance, the doc said. After the surgery there would be chemo, purification by poison, cold sweats and sleepless nights. On the hospital bed one day, staring at three large drip bags, a thought flashed across her mind: “Death, in the medical sense, is a piece of eraser, erasing all non-tangible traces that a person was on this world. What can I do to certify that I was once alive? That I lived, and was worth remembering?”

If I am to pass, the 44-year-old thought, I need to leave behind a place where he can find me.

Zhu Jinxiu 朱锦绣 and Sheng Zichao’s 盛子潮 fates intertwined at Xiamen University, but they took radically different paths to get there. Jinxiu attended only four years of primary school, denied any further education due to the turbulence of the era. Through self-study — reading books in the attic, mostly — she managed to test well enough in the language portion of the 1979 national college entrance exam to be accepted into Xiamen’s English department. Zichao, on the other hand, was born to write. He published his first work at age 17, and was a natural fit for the Chinese department of Zhejiang Normal University. He was a graduate student in literature when he met Jinxiu in Xiamen. They married in 1986, and a year later moved to Hangzhou, where they had their only child, Sheng Xia 盛厦 — named after the city where his parents met.

The couple hosted salons and led a literary life, with Zichao joining the China Writers Association in 1995. They were a model pair, two lovebirds from China’s last generation of romantics. But everything changed in 1999, when Jinxiu was diagnosed with colon cancer. Her condition deteriorated precipitously. When she went under the knife, Zichao turned to poetry in the waiting room, penning “Love in Life and Death” 生死相恋:

忆往昔、忆爱妻，
从今后人生无趣；
思今夜、思终极，
愿来世再做夫妻。

Remember the past, remember one’s love,
Henceforth, dullness and dolor mark this life;
Think on night, think on the end,
In the next life, we’ll again be husband and wife.

There are numerous articles recounting Jinxiu and Zichao’s love, framing their relationship like a fairy tale. But while she was racked by illness and desperate to find — or create — meaning for herself — I need to leave behind a place where he can find me — Jinxiu may have been thinking as much about a place as about a person.

She wanted to start a bookstore.

More accurately, a book bar, 书吧. The idea seized her and wouldn’t let go. In delirium, details emerged with uncanny clarity: she saw the bar counter, the long bookshelf, the nook in which, as she would explain, “people like me, who enjoy foreign languages, can interact with others and practice.” She envisioned a place of refinement, culture, and leisure, where friends could throw birthday parties, have heart-to-hearts, and organize lectures. Above all, it was a place where people could allow books to transport them to faraway lands and long-ago times.

Zichao expressed skepticism, initially. He enlisted his friends to help him dissuade his wife. You are not in good health, they said. Books and bars can’t coexist — readers want quiet, bar-goers want commotion. Couples should not enter into business together — who would have final say? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Your career, your love, all wagered for the sake of maintaining a profit — too dangerous!

Maybe Zichao was merely testing his wife’s resolve. And just like twenty years ago, when she passed the college entrance exam through sheer will, Jinxiu was determined to see this through. As she recuperated, she traveled to Shanghai and Beijing to seek inspiration. She dragged her worn-out body across Hangzhou scouting for a location. Zichao came around to the idea — it had been his wife’s dying wish, after all — and pledged his support. Then, on September 25, 2000, Jinxiu published an article in Qianjiang Evening News 钱江晚报 headlined, “Desire to open a book bar.”

Near the top, she writes, “Under lots of love and support, a thought arose from deep within my heart: ‘Open a book bar.’ In Hangzhou there are so many teahouses, pubs, coffeeshops, internet bars…why is there no book bar? So the idea of opening one grabbed hold and was impossible to shake.”

The tone then changes. “Am I hoping for too much?” She describes her travels and reiterates her determination to give her idea a home. And then, a rather sudden revelation: “After searching for her across a thousand leagues, I looked back suddenly and there she was, in a dimly lit place — the intersection of Wensan West Road and Fengtan Road — in the western part of the city…She is waiting for her soulmate. ‘The call seldom produces the comer,’ Hardy wrote” — a quote from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles — “but I say, No. To the call, my response — just like Jane Eyre’s to Rochester — ‘I’m coming!’”

Later that year, 纯真年代 was born. “You have a new sister,” Jinxiu told her son Sheng Xia, then fourteen years old.

The English name of the shop was a clunky literal translation — “Innocent Age” — but it was a reference to Age of Innocence, a 1993 Martin Scorsese film adapted from a 1920 Edith Wharton novel. In the story, a lawyer (played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the movie) rejects what he believes is true love with a countess in favor of a respectable marriage with a young New Yorker. The two have a gratifying life together, though the specter of forsaken love looms until the very end. “For her, ‘Age of Innocence’ is about a kind of nostalgia,” Zichao said around the time of the book bar’s opening. “But for me, it is a kind of irony.”

Zhu Jinxiu’s health turned for the better. At the same time, the bookstore became a favorite meeting spot for those within the Chinese literary community and beyond. Before he won the Nobel Prize, Mo Yan hung out there — his signature hangs on the wall of one of the rooms, along with a couplet he wrote for the couple. Yu Hua, Bei Dao, Bi Feiyu, and many others from China’s literary scene have declared their admiration. This didn’t necessarily translate to healthy profits, mind you. “How’s business?” the writer Mai Jia once asked. Zichao explained that it wasn’t possible to make money, but that it was OK because making money was never the point. Zichao must really be rich, Mai Jia thought, because there are two kinds of rich people: the type that has a lot of money, and the type that takes money lightly.

During the SARS epidemic in 2003, the owners took out a loan to keep the bookstore running, even at a loss. Jinxiu did repairs and cleaning herself. Eventually, rent hikes forced the store to change locations. In 2009, it moved to its current spot, up 236 stairs on Baoshi Mountain. The trek up was symbolic of what Jinxiu believed about books: that they deserve a lofty status in society, and deserve to literally be above the pedestrian.

Eventual Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan presents a couplet to Zhu Jinxiu that reads, “Upstairs, behold beauty [Jinxiu] / In the lake, dare to make waves [Zichao],” with a pun on the bar owners’ names (my translation).

It would be convenient if the story stopped here. Fairy tales end with “happily ever after,” but these are the words of the non-serious writer, both Jinxiu and Zichao would have recognized. Life ends with death. In 2012, Sheng Zichao was diagnosed with late-stage throat cancer. He battled the disease — and death — “poetically,” Jinxiu would later observe. On August 24, 2013, fifteen months after his diagnosis, Zichao wrote his final message on social media: “Thank you Jinxiu, for what, I’ll not tell you for now.” He passed away five days later with his wife and son by his side.

Not long after, Sheng Xia quit his job at the investment bank CITIC Securities to support his mother full-time at the book bar. “My parents’ thinking was very pure and very romantic,” he said. “Their perseverance had a hint of stubbornness to it. Perhaps that’s a characteristic of their generation.” In 2018, the shop opened a second branch, in a new area of Hangzhou called Yang Liu Jun. At this time, the English name of the store changed to “In a Cultural House.” The Yang Liu Jun branch stared down bankruptcy in 2020: a post on the bookstore’s social media account inspired a groundswell of support that rescued it. Mother and son continue to run both bookstores, personally looking after the many events that happen on a regular basis.

“We hope the book bar will become the cultural living room next to West Lake,” Sheng Xia said, referencing Hangzhou’s representative attraction. “More so, we hope it’ll stay around for a hundred years. Just as Shakespeare and Company on Paris’s Left Bank, the lights of In a Cultural House have always shone on the banks of West Lake.”

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It’s a humid summer day, and from the bottom of the stairs, there’s no bookstore in sight. The long climb begins with one step, and then another. Good things come to those who put in the effort. But the effort is also a self-fulfilling prophesy: whatever is the reward, it’ll feel more worthwhile because it was harder to attain. At some point in the ascent, I begin counting down the stairs remaining instead of counting up the ones already taken.

There may be an analogy here about the effort of running a bookstore, or a bar, or any cultural space: the effort is the point. Yet owners give so much of themselves, is it fair that they’re rewarded more generously through praise than revenue? Is it hoping for too much that cultural spaces might succeed financially, indefinitely? Or must we acknowledge that independent bookstores have finite lifespans, and that we need to appreciate them, fully, while they’re here?

At the top of the 236 stairs, one notices the colors first, the soft brown wood that absorbs all harshness from the lights. The bar greets you as you enter the front door. There is a restaurant to the right, and a room of books to the left, along with a shelf of snacks. The design is of rustic sophistication, a homely hideaway. Upstairs, one finds wines behind a glass case, and then a room with Mo Yan’s framed poem on the wall, with a row of windows that open out to a view of West Lake. Leaves are reflected in the varnish of the windowsill and table.

This was the room where I gave my talk, sitting in front of a wall of books — a poetry section, incidentally. The event was sparsely attended, though two of the people there (one of them being SDG Lemaître, who I became acquainted with through Substack) came from the next town over, and another was someone I met nearly a decade ago in Beijing, who I hadn’t seen for years. There were not a lot of people in the entirety of the three-story bookstore/bar, which meant the outdoor courtyard seats were unoccupied, certain rooms empty. But everyone who was there looked comfortable; some were clearly old friends of the establishment, while some may have been making a pilgrimage to Hangzhou’s renowned cultural nexus, the city’s first book bar.

Sheng Xia was working that night, but his mother wasn’t there. I would’ve liked to meet her, but I’m not sure what I could have said. Nice to meet you, I really like what you’ve done with this place? Maybe I would have told her I wanted to write up her story, and ask for a quote. Maybe we could have bonded over The Bookworm, the beloved late bookstore/lending library/restaurant/cafe/bar/event space in Beijing (with branches in Chengdu and Suzhou). I guess I would said thank you. I’m not sure there’s praise she hasn’t received. I think, simply, she would have been pleased to know that what she created was worth remembering.

The view of West Lake from the second floor of In a Cultural House.

Sheng Zichao razzed Mo Yan about his first poem written for the bar (see the Mo Yan photo above), so the famous author wrote another one. This, which hung in the room I read in, was a tad more formal: “See the mountain overlooking beauty [Jinxiu] / Seek answers from the lake’s waves [Zichao]” (my translation).

Photo by Sheng Xia. The framed poem is by the local author Zhang Kangkang.

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I’ve borrowed quotes, anecdotes, and facts from multiple sources to write the above. Zhu Jinxiu’s own words can be found here, via In a Cultural House’s official WeChat channel, which also has this timeline. I excerpted liberally from this article, which I thought was a nice telling of the couple’s story. Xiamen University had a poetic write-up of its alums, featuring some great photos of the two through the years. There’s this and this, and here’s Sheng Zichao’s bio from the search engine Sogou. My gratitude to those who attended the book reading last week. Most of all, I’d like to thank Zoe Xie for introducing me to Sheng Xia and organizing activities at Hangzhou International School, Zuowang Study in Suzhou, and Cafe Belong in Nanjing.