Occupying the Cracks: Hong Kong Independent Bookstores

To: Hong Kongers,

We are staying because we still love the city. Even though it is no longer familiar, we still want to continue to witness what the future will look like.

Thank you for staying, for giving us a place to breathe.
These were letters addressed to no particular recipients, but to all who were living through and witnessing the same reality. Over three years, twelve visitor books have been filled at Have a Nice Stay bookstore. Rainwater left wrinkles and brown marks on the covers. It seeped through the binding and moistened the ink on the inner pages, blurring some messages. These notebooks become a means of communication between people who are about to leave, who are staying, who have left and came back, and who have yet to make a decision. Asynchronous conversations took place between strangers.

Walking up the streets of Hong Kong is like wading through a labyrinth of floating signs: neon-lit and bold characters jostle for the attention of the rushing crowd. In the cracks of old high-rise buildings, a community of independent bookstores carves out intimate spaces for book readings, performances, workshops, and exhibitions. The dense and vertically-oriented urban environment is conducive to the creation of small hidden spaces on higher floors, giving rise to a typology of “second-floor bookstore” or “upstairs bookstore.”

To enter this hidden territory, one has to walk through the staircase to reach a retro elevator at the end of the hallway. The floor numbers blink one after the other as the elevator trembles to a sudden stop and opens to a beige interior – just enough space for two people to squeeze in. On every surface, layers of stickers ripped notes, and taped posters form a superimposed landscape of signs. The seemingly chaotic configuration of information has an inner temporal logic. Old messages are buried beneath the more recent ones. Words and images accrue uncanny links with each other as they overlay and juxtapose. A printed slogan “consciously observe the present reality” leads to a series of headless animals chasing after each other.

These pasted-over walls are constantly exposed to natural wear and tear, touch, and interventions. The faces of some stickers are completely peeled off, leaving only a white layer of glued paper. Their silhouettes, or rather their ghosts, continue to occupy space. Their stickiness represents a kind of material resistance against erasure – nothing ever fully goes away, rather they hide and linger on surfaces.

After streets are cleaned, and everyday life resumes, how are people finding alternative ways to continue resistance? These bookstores are not one-off demonstration sites but rather hubs of continuous gathering throughout months and years. They cultivate a hotbed for seeds of revolution to emerge and for the slow process of reckoning and healing to unfold long beyond the moment of protest. These bookstores practice what Kimberley Kinder calls “constructive activism” – the process of building enduring physical spaces that facilitates social organizing in a repeatable way. These “durable spaces” enable the construction of a community which does not happen overnight. The creation of an autonomous space as opposed to relying on temporarily seized or borrowed spaces allows sustained relationships to develop. The bookstores possess a kind of temporal latency – a slowness that manifests in the everyday process of maintenance and accumulation. As people come and go, they bring in objects and stories and leave marks on the space. Gradually and collectively, they build a living archive of handmade zines, posters, notes, books, stickers, plants, conversations, events, and memories that fill every corner and surface of the space.