Inside the oldest Asian American bookstore in the United States

The San Francisco Giants game is playing on the radio when I push open the door and enter the building, a tinkle of chimes announcing my arrival. It’s a Saturday afternoon, one of two rare time slots a week the store is open, and early June light filters in from two massive skylights. Lining the walls are stacks of new and out-of-print books on all elements of Asian American history and culture. The spines of some have seen so many years of sun, these new books could pass for used.

Outside, a plain green awning reads simply: “Asian American Books.”

It’s an understatedness indicative of the Asian American Curriculum Project (AACP), which few today know as the nation’s oldest and longest-operating Asian American bookstore and publisher. It’s now also the only bookstore left in downtown San Mateo, California—a rapidly gentrifying city in the Bay Area today more readily associated with Silicon Valley than Asian American history, despite being only eight miles from the former site of the Tanforan assembly center. Founded in 1969 as the Japanese American Curriculum Project by a group of educators and internment survivors, the organization has gone through several iterations, name changes and relocations in its 56-year history, but the overstuffed shelves and stacks of old photographs still serve as a testament to its impact in the community.

There’s an element of serendipity and magic in encountering AACP that anyone who has visited the store will tell you. Tucked in an unassuming corner of downtown, on the other side of the commuter rail tracks from a busy retail corridor (I counted 14 boba shops in a one-and-a-half square mile radius), “those who need us are somehow always able to find us,” board president and general manager Leonard Chan tells me with a shrug.

Chan was one of those people: while making a routine visit to his bank, he spotted the storefront, wondering how he’d missed it in the seven years he’d lived and worked in San Mateo. He walked in, and by all accounts, never left. This year will be his 28th with the organization.

Most volunteers and customers, like me, share stumbling upon the store for the first time and seeing something of themselves reflecting back from the meticulously selected window display.

Harrison Zhuang, who started volunteering with AACP two summers ago, quickly became drawn to the intergenerational perspectives the organization offered. “Before AACP, all of the older Asian people I knew were immigrants,” he says. “It’s been really nice to learn from older Asian Americans who grew up here about their experiences and histories.”

Foot traffic to the store is light. Prior to the rise of Amazon, the bookstore did most of its business via mail-order catalog. In a time when Asian American books were hard to access for many around the country, AACP’s community was built from word of mouth, conference events, and the U.S. Postal Service. (Its last catalog was printed in 2007; today, the store maintains an online presence via bookshop.org).

“I was always surprised by how many people seemed to know us wherever we went,” Chan says.

Things are quieter around 529 E. 3rd Ave. these days than they used to be. While AACP was founded to preserve Japanese American history and keep the painful past of internment from repeating, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the survivor community is aging. 

Chan puts it matter-of-factly, as the remaining internment survivors on the board have died, “it’s up to me to continue telling their stories.”

These are big shoes to fill. Two years after the death of Florence Hongo, a founder and longtime leader of the organization, and her husband Mas Hongo (who joked that he was the “janitor of AACP”), their presence still fills the store. Flo’s desk is still piled high with papers, a mercury thermometer, a roll of Scotch packaging tape, and a baseball-themed clock. The back of the store is stacked with boxed records that were once kept in Flo’s garage and since moved to the store when her family cleared out her house. The store, which in its heyday hosted author signings, book launches and poetry readings in the small space, has kept its anachronisms as an archive of the Hongos’ love and care.

Halfway through our conversation, Chan pauses mid sentence to listen to the commotion on the radio.

Giants just won, he tells me with a soft grin. The radio was Flo’s too; she was a huge Giants fan, and even named her cat Barry Bonds.

A lot has changed in 56 years. Besides the name change, the organization continues to expand its selection of works across the community’s many diasporas, including Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Central and West Asian.

Travel to conferences, conventions or pilgrimages to former concentration camp sites such as Tule Lake has slowed as members of the board have aged or died. The organization publishes fewer titles now, though they’re hopeful they can ramp up again: befitting their educational mission, their most recent title is a coloring book for Japanese language learning.

Popular genres have shifted over time, too. Chan jokes that the Asian American fantasy and romance writers of today are so prolific, the store can’t keep up.

Without the Hongos’ retirement savings—which funded the AACP—money is tight. Still, the organization has big dreams for the next 56 years. Zhuang, who joined the AACP board in 2023, has hopes to renovate the infrastructure in the store and create more space to host readings and events, and provide a space for community gathering after work hours.

“I just really appreciate that the founders of this organization built something that lasted beyond their own lifetimes,” Zhuang tells me. “I’d love to preserve that history, continue the legacy of the organization and steward it into a new era.”

There’s a lot to do to bring the store into the 2020s—and volunteers emphasize that they could always use more help getting organized. As I leave the store, I spot one attempt on a whiteboard in the back. Written neatly in capital letters—beneath a list of to-dos (“1. BRING IN WHITE BOARD, 2. FIND A PLACE TO PUT IT”)—are the words, “CHANGE CAN BE GOOD. BUT NOT ALWAYS.”

Someone has rubbed away the word “NOT,” leaving only a faint outline of hesitation.