Cats and music among the secret ingredients for success at Hong Kong bookstore
Caroline Chan, who has owned Sam Kee Book Co for more than three decades, reflects on the changing nature of mainland customers and why she doesn’t like the term ‘banned books’
What do banned books, music and cats have in common? At Sam Kee Book Co, they are the three key elements that have kept the modest basement bookstore alive through more than three decades of changes.
“I joined the bookshop as a junior clerk in 1978, the year my family and I arrived in Hong Kong,” the incumbent owner Caroline Chan, a native of Jimei in Fujian province, recalled.
“I have loved music since learning the violin with a Russian teacher in my younger days. So I installed a stereo system and there’s always classical music at the bookshop ,” she said in Cantonese with a minor accent.
Until one day the music stopped.
“It was some mice biting the speakers’ cables. So I brought in a cat. Since then, music and cats have coexisted in my shop, keeping company to some 40,000 books here,” she said.
That was 1985, the year she took over the shop as the previous owner joined the exodus that followed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. Since then she has adopted more than 700 cats, abandoned as kittens, and given them away once they’ve grown strong and fluffy.