Cathie Guo Xiaomeng

At the centre of the crowded Sai Yeung Choi Street in Mongkok, there quietly located a seventh-floor bookstore named Hong Kong Reader. Daniel Lee Dat-ning was sitting in the cafe corner of the bookstore and shared his dream of culture with us.

“I don’t mind being different,” Daniel Lee, a 26-year-old philosophy graduate of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), said. He decided to open an academic bookstore with two other philosophy graduates, rather than applying for a job, as his first step to enter the society.

During his study at CUHK, Daniel joined a reading party organized by postgraduates where he met one of his partners. They shared lots of views through discussion on classical works. He said it was a valuable experience that inspired him to organize lectures in his bookstore.

Daniel Lee is the only child in his family. When he needed to stay alone, he spent his time on reading. He firstly got interested in a philosophy comic book named “Cartoon Zhuang Zi” illustrated by Tsai Chih-chung.

Daniel has run Hong Kong Reader for almost two years but it was hot supposed to be a bookstore at the beginning. “We wanted to open a cafe at first, a place like a cultural salon, to promote literature and culture of Hong Kong,” he said.

After visiting other cafes in Hong Kong, Daniel found that they were not suitable for discussion. “Finally we decided to open a bookstore which provides room and space to give lectures. This would gather people who share the enthusiasm in the same area,” Daniel said.

The lectures in Hong Kong Reader provide a more academic atmosphere than other upstairs-bookstores. He said it was not easy to gather a large group of people in a short period of time. Although few people knew about their forums at the beginning, Daniel and his partners persevered in inviting academic authorities every week to deliver a wide range of topics related to modern society.

Holding forum two or three times a week has become the tradition of the bookstore. Daniel said that he was no longer worried about finding lecturers because there were various specialists contacting him on their own.

Under the economic downturn, Daniel said the business condition of Hong Kong Reader was slightly affected because most of their earnings are from frequent customers. However, the academic bookstore is not a lucrative business. “To be honest, it’s really hard to make life on it but we never thought of changing our occupations,” said Daniel Lee.

Daniel said that they were not very satisfied with the status quo of the society. He admired many famous historical figures such as Sun Yat-sen because they were always ahead of the times. With the slogan “more thinking, less numbness” on their mind, Daniel and his partners are motivated to run this bookstore and influence more readers.

Daniel got a deeper understanding of the real cultural development through his daily observations in Hong Kong Reader. “People always call Hong Kong a cultural desert, but what I have seen during these two years is that though it’s not a large group, someone is still reading books,” Daniel said.

Daniel also said that promoting culture was a long-term job which cannot only depend on their three’s powers.

But “small group can do more and better” is the belief that motivated him and his partners to keep running Hong Kong Reader. Even the earnings are not as much as expected, they still have their dreams. “The reality is that people only spend their spare time on culture rather than doing this as a full-time job, but my dream is to put it in the centre of people’s lives,” he said.

Although it is hard to make a living with the bookstore, it is not their terminus. “Our ambition is to turn culture into an industry, but it is not about profit. It is not about how much we expect to earn, but a job to encourage people to read more, think more, and at the same time, can make their living,” he said.

Edited by Connie Wan Pui-lam