From Hong Kong to Honeoye Falls, independent bookstore Bleak House Books to reopen in rural Western New York

Bleak House Books, one of Hong Kong’s few independent English-language bookstores, closed in October 2021.(Airam Dato-on/Unsplash)

Less than a year after closing an independent English-language bookstore in Hong Kong, one of the American owners says the store is about to be reopened in the Western New York village of Honeoye Falls.

“It is a place where our family now calls home and where we hope to build and foster the same kind of community that kept us sane and gave us a sense of purpose during some of the darkest and hardest days in Hong Kong,” wrote Albert Wan in an August 28 post on the Facebook page of Bleak House Books. He also discussed the departure from Hong Kong and the new beginning in Honeoye Falls on Twitter.

On August 29, 2021, the Hong Kong Free Press reported that Wan and his wife Jenny Smith were planning to close the Hong Kong bookstore on October 15 of that year. Wan told the news outlet that the closure of the store, which they had founded in 2017, had been made necessary by the political uncertainty and “pressure to self-censor” resulting from the national security law imposed by mainland China in June 2020.

Later that day, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the closing of the Hong Kong bookstore was "another ominous sign as Beijing crushes Hong Kong's freedoms."

Wan, an attorney, and Smith, a former faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), eventually returned to the United State with their children.

In the Facebook post about the new beginning in Honeoye Falls, Wan said the couple had signed the lease for the bookstore on August 26. He said the store would be "bigger, in space and selection, and operate in a climate of considerable uncertainty, conflict and cost."

Addressing his Facebook followers, Wan said, "And so we roll up our sleeves, take a deep breath and start the process all over again: the journey of building another bookshop from the ground up, one book and one reader at a time. Won't you join us?"