On the 4th of July, 2023, Lucy Yu stood outside of the Chinatown bookstore that bore her name and watched it burn. Yu & Me Books had occupied a ground floor on Mulberry Street in downtown Manhattan for a little more than two years and quickly wove itself into the community in a way that only good bookstores can. “I had regulars that were 80-years old who would come in, and then they’d bring their grandkids,” Lucy told me as we sat together in her store’s temporary location. “To be there and see these cross-generational conversations in the store in our reading room. It was really special, I wasn’t expecting it.”