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Los Angeles Times

At World Books, Lily Li picks up the phone to transact one of her first sales of the day.
"Hello, this is World Books," says Li, 60. "Can you add $60 to this phone card?"
She hands the card back to the man waiting at the counter, then picks up the phone again to make her next sale: a small commission fee for helping a customer buy an ad in a Chinese newspaper.
On her shelves, baby turtles swim in bright plastic tanks next to cans of soft drink and a pamphlet advertising Scientology. Walking sticks hang off a cart of adult DVDs. Shampoos and back scratchers tempt from a display by the door.
As for books, they mostly gather dust.
Internet competition has forced bookshops across the United States to close - but in the San Gabriel Valley, they've evolved.
Chinese bookshops now ship packages, repair laptops, supply lottery tickets. One bookshop became a classroom, another a convenience store.
Their owners came to America with a dream, only to watch it fade. To keep it alive, they've painted it a different colour.
"A bookstore, you can do anything with it," says Helen Duong, who teaches English and Chinese, hosts calligraphy and art lessons, and offers free classes on how to pass the citizenship test in a classroom she created in the back of her Alhambra bookshop.
"It doesn't matter what it is," she says, "as long as it's something people need."
Rebecca Zhang waves a smudged pink spiral notebook in disgust. It records sales at her shop - and today it's blank.
"If you want to sell books these days, you're doomed," she admits.
So she sells whatever she can get her hands on - sandals, luggage, phone cards, mops. She just received a shipment of fung shui calendars for next year.
Her bookshop is one of several storefronts crammed inside the Hong Kong Supermarket, a pastel-pink grocery store that is starting to show its age.
Zhang never wanted to sell books. In Beijing she was a nurse, and when she first came to America she helped care for children of birth tourists - pregnant mothers who fly to America to give birth to children with US citizenship.
She bought the shop a decade ago because a friend gave her a good price.
Back then, there was so much foot traffic that two cashiers ringing up sales simultaneously couldn't keep lines from forming.
She shakes her head as she thinks about the last decade - book sales declining, her shop space cut in half.
A few years ago she tried to sell the lease to someone else, but no one wanted it. She sold phone cards for a while, but then the internet stole that business too.
Today she's pushing mahjong. She overhears two shoppers mention the mahjong sets in the window and rushes out to invite them in.
"We've got that in here," she says. "Do you want big ones or small ones?"
At NHK Books in Alhambra, a man in a pinstripe shirt and a baseball cap and a cook in a smudged apron approach Cecilia Ng at the register.
The cook buys a soft drink and leaves. The man buys a lottery ticket - his fifth or sixth of the night. Neither customer notices the books on display.
"We used to sell books," Ng says. "Now we're more like 7-Eleven for Chinese people."
The bookshop turned convenience store is part of a big chain of Chinese bookshops originating in Hong Kong that dates to 1954.
NHK's Hong Kong locations are still traditional bookshops. In America, Ng says, everything's gone downhill since people started buying their books online.
Still, she's never mourned the lost identity. "If you don't change, you die," she admits.
 


	Novel customer at bookstore
US President Barack Obama tried to draw attention to independently owned businesses on the Saturday after the Thanksgiving holiday, a day that is increasingly being marketed as one for consumers to remember to patronise small businesses.
He bought 17 titles during a stop at Politics and Prose, a Washington bookstore owned by a former Washington Post reporter and his wife, also a former Post reporter who later worked for Hillary Clinton.
In recent years, the Saturday after Thanksgiving has been advertised as "Small Business Saturday". It's designed to drive foot traffic to independent stores in between the frenzy of Black Friday sales at mass retailers and the Cyber Monday deals online.
Obama browsed with his daughters, Malia and Sasha. He held one shopper's baby and chatted with crime novelist David Baldacci. While at the cash register, one patron encouraged Obama to close the US facility in Cuba where suspected terrorists are detained.
Obama joked, "Hope it works" when he handed his credit card to the cashier.
The president bought a mixture of titles apparently chosen to satisfy readers young and old.
Among the books in Obama's shopping bags for mature readers were Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by New Yorker writer Evan Osnos.
Associated Press
 


Chinese bookshops in US diversify stock to overcome online competition

Bookshop owner Helen Duong helps schoolgirls with their homework at her store in Alhambra, California. Photo: TNS

Obama at Politics and Prose. Photo: Reuters

News

World

Enterprising Chinese owners are fighting to stay afloat in the United States by stocking up on everything from turtles to phone cards


At World Books, Lily Li picks up the phone to transact one of her first sales of the day. "Hello, this is World Books," says Li, 60. "Can you add $60 to this phone card?"
