Henry J. Holcomb
Inquirer Staff Writer
Lilly Feihong Song began her working life here scrubbing toilets, working her way up to washing dishes. Now she's an entrepreneur who, at noon Sunday, will open her third business, the Shanghai Bazaar, in Chinatown.
Her story begins in China, where she was a schoolteacher, and winds its way through her coming to America, getting divorced, and plunging into the hardscrabble life of an immigrant single mother. In the midst of all this, she decided that Chinatown needed an authentic bookstore.
This led to battles with corruption during shopping trips to China, and, with her daughter's help, to navigating bureaucracies and a maze of paperwork and lawyers here. Along the way, she was blessed by helpful Americans, survived a debilitating bout with cancer, worked seven long days a week, and developed a vision for how to help immigrants become entrepreneurs.
Her story is told mostly by her daughter, Nan Zhang, 19, a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in American literature and economics. She learned English sooner than her mother, so she handled early dealings with bureaucracies and lawyers.
"When I was 13, I would go to the Municipal Services Building. I looked up at big men in dark suits and thought, 'I don't know whether they can help us or hurt us,' " Zhang said over tea while home for spring break, in an interview punctuated with bookstore customers' questions.
"I learned to remember faces and names, to memorize phone numbers of people who were helpful. I learned to go back to them, and to keep following up and following up. I grew up very fast," she said.
Fast, indeed, particularly when a lustful Chinese gangster stalked her mother early in their time here. For months, Zhang said, she slept by the door, with a big kitchen knife. Through some amateur detective work, she learned that the man was here illegally and got him deported.
Her mother's first business was a short-lived cafe in South Philadelphia. The next was the New China Bookstore, now at 1010 Race St. The new venture, at 1016 Race St., is a big, authentic Chinese bazaar, 13,000 square feet on two levels, of stalls selling clothing, furniture, gifts, musical instruments, art and other things.
Initially she will own all of the stalls. Later, some will be sold.
With its broad range of merchandise, "the Shanghai Bazaar shows the growth of this community as a residential community, not just a business center and tourist attraction," said John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. Her concept, he said, will "allow new immigrants, who have little money and limited job opportunities, to go into his or her own business."
Going into business was much harder than Song imagined. The bookstore opened in 1999, on the second and third floors of 929 Arch St. She and her daughter, both petite, rented trailers to pick up merchandise, and lugged 75-pound boxes of books up flights of stairs.
"My mother shed blood and tears getting that store started," Zhang said.
"I am just very persistent," her mother said. "I made up my mind that I wanted to have a bookstore."
Her first shopping trips to China were steeped in frustration. "Every item I wanted to sell in my store, I picked myself. Half of what they shipped to me was trash. I picked porcelain and they sent cardboard," Song recalled.
Some wooden musical instruments and picture frames arrived in pieces, said to have been shattered by customs agents searching for termites.
She soon found people and experts she could trust.
Now her bookstore offers among the nation's largest collections of Chinese books, music and videos. Others offer mostly material from Taiwan, which is as different as literature from England is to that of the United States.
The store attracted, among others, Americans with adopted Chinese children.
"I was touched that the Americans wanted their children to hold onto their culture," Song said. So she started teaching classes on Chinese culture at the store, and she provided a place for traditional Chinese birthday parties.
Later, she added more than a dozen computers, equipped to work with many languages, to help immigrants find jobs, do schoolwork, and keep in touch with families overseas.
For now, Song, 49, will operate both the bookstore and the new bazaar, a few doors to the east.
Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has completed a doctorate in art history at the University of Cincinnati and returned to China.
Song has never remarried.
"She's married to the store, but she's a wonderful cook... and very good storyteller. And she knits, she sews, beats me at chess, and is a gifted singer and musician... . She plays the pipa, a Chinese mandolin," her daughter said, pointing to a heart-shaped stringed instrument on the wall.
Her mother, she said, "has built her life around the exchanges at the store. She loves it when kids come in with parents. She loves telling non-Chinese people what things are." She remembers what people have purchased in the past, what they like.
Zhang has fond memories of early childhood in Hangzhou, near Shanghai on China's east coast, and misses her grandfather, Baoluo Song, 88, "a tall man with a big white beard," an artist and opera singer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. She remembers riding on the back of her mother's bicycle, along the banks of the city's beautiful Westlake.
But she thinks in English now, and majors in American literature because "I love it... . It is about more different kinds of people, with different backgrounds and trauma."
Song is called Lilly, her American name. But, her daughter believes, she lives her Chinese name, Feihong, which means "very strong bird."
