Helping to fulfill a stranger’s dreams, kindness from the world, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
There was, a blue billboard, with “Bookstore by the Beach” on the South Gates Street in Hsinchu, it’s not only, the eldest of the secondhand bookstores locally, it’s also, a tale, of a thirty-year-old friendship of the landlord and tenant as well.
“Hey, may I, open up a bookstore here?”, about forty years ago, a single retired serviceman, Chen, from China, arrived at the Sun’s household on South Gates Street, asked the landlord if he could rent the space, to set up a bookstore? He said, that his dreams when he was younger, was to, own a bookstore.
Huang thought there are, a ton of bars around, that with a bookstore, to change the environment, would be, a great idea, and agreed, to rent Yao Chen the L-shaped space, of two hundred square feet. And since then, the “Beachside Bookstore” was in business, and this space lasted, for thirty years on end.
The landlord, Huang said, that Chen loved books, that he’d worked in publishing while he was still in China, that after he’d come to Taiwan alone, he’d carried a book everywhere he went. And the name of the bookstore, “Beachside”, was because Chen kept looking at the other side of the strait, toward his homeland.
“He’d rented the house for thirty years with us, he’d become, like a member of the family already”. Ten years ago, Chen fell ill, and had nobody to look after him, Huang had, made his trips to the hospitals every single day to take care of him. As Chen was about to pass away, he just felt, unwilling, to let go of the “Beachside Bookshop”, left the last will, “Hope that you can, keep the bookshop going for me.”
people sorting through books in the shop, from the Newspapers…
After Chen died, the owner of the bookshop was passed to Huang, and, her son, Sun, on the weekends, would come home to help around the shop.
Sun told, that he’d run around the shop as a kid, he’d grown up inside the bookstore, that he and his other two siblings already saw Chen as their kin, and the bookshop was on the first floor, and, going home on the second floor, they’d needed to, pass through the shop. And, Grandpa Chen died a decade ago, and the family called a meeting to vote, and everybody wanted to keep this bookshop going, to keep this, beautiful memory intact.
Sun smiled and told, that his mother would normally watch over the store, he and his older sister both had their separate jobs, but, every time on the weekends or the holidays, he and his sister would come home on rotations. And now, his son too, is playing inside this space, “although there’s, a steady decline of people who loved reading, but, thankfully, this is our own property, there’s no worries of the costs.”
Sun said, seventy-percent of those who’d come to the secondhand bookstore to find books are over age forty-five, and that he welcomes, the members of the younger generations to come in for a stroll, to feel the books’ pages between their fingers.
This, is how a legacy is passed down, and, the people here, they’re not even related by blood, but, they’d shared this mutual respect, this love for one another, they’d become, each other’s families, and that, is what makes this secondhand bookshop so special, not the books that it carried, but the stories it tells!