A library born in exile becomes a global refuge for the Chinese diaspora

She packed for summer. Light clothes, a small luggage, three months in Taipei, a business trip, nothing more. That was 2020. Annie has not returned to Hong Kong since.

"It's not by plan," she says, with a laugh that carries more weight than it lets on. "Like the stories of the bookstore, I didn't make a map to choose where to go."

Six years later, the woman who left with a suitcase of summer clothes has built something that now stretches from Taipei to Chiang Mai, from Oakland to the edges of Auckland, a quiet, borderless library for the displaced, the silenced, and those who refuse to forget.

The Journalist Who Couldn't Go Home

Annie was born in mainland China in 1983 and spent nearly two decades there before arriving in Hong Kong to study journalism at the University of Hong Kong. She graduated in 2005 and began a career that would last more than a decade, reporting, investigating, pushing against the boundaries of what Chinese-language media was willing to say.

In 2015, she co-founded Initiation Media, one of the most influential in-depth news organisations serving the global overseas Chinese community. Three years later, she launched Matters, a writing platform built on blockchain technology, designed specifically so that content could not be deleted by government order. The mission was simple and dangerous: anti-censorship, by design.

She was not a dissident in the dramatic sense. She was something quieter and perhaps more dangerous, a journalist who believed facts mattered.

Then came 2020, and the National Security Law.

Annie arrived in Taiwan in the middle of a pandemic on what was supposed to be a three-month visit. Her team was based there. She had recently ended a relationship. She rented an Airbnb, brought warm-weather clothes, and figured she would be back in Hong Kong by autumn.

She was wrong.

During her second month in Taipei, the collaborators on a project she had worked on, related to the memory of the June Fourth massacre - were arrested. Her lawyer called. The advice was clear: don't come back. Not yet. The case, she was told, was not that serious for her specifically. She had only helped with the content publication.

"The lawyer told me you can go back when our case is closed. But until now, the case is still going in," she said.

That was six years go.

Three months of Airbnb became six. Six became twelve. Eventually, Annie signed a lease, then another. She began to buy furniture. She was building a life in a city she had not chosen, in a country where she had not planned to stay, watching from across a strait as everything she had known in Hong Kong was systemically dismantled.

Back in Hong Kong, the numbers were staggering. More than 20,000 people were arrested in the aftermath of the 2019 protests. Pro-democracy lawmakers, human rights lawyers, independent journalists, NGOs - what Annie calls 'almost all the civil society parts' - were erased within two or three years. Cinemas and art galleries grew so frightened that they began self-censoring further than the law required.

Even famous artists, like the beloved Cantonese singer Anthony Wong, lost the small stages they had once occupied.

"It feels almost impossible," Annie says of trying to freely express yourself in Hong Kong today. "And it changed so quickly. It's not even fifty years, it's only five years."

Adopting the Orphaned Bookstore

Taiwan had become a refuge for Hong Kong's creative class. Writers, filmmakers, translators, publishers - they came because it was, as JP describes it, 'the last free place in the world for Chinese creative work.' Malaysia and Singapore had their own censorship. The West was possible but distant, and always in another language.

In Taipei's Ximending district, a Hong Kong architect had opened a small bookstore - a space stocked with Cantonese books and music, where people could speak their mother tongue without apology. For the community of displaced Hong Kongers, it was a small miracle. Then the architect had to leave for the UK, his residency paperwork had fallen through, and the store closed almost overnight.

JP watched her friends' grief and understood it immediately. "It seems like people gradually build a small spot that they can put their mother tongue in it, and quickly lose it again," she says.

In 2022, she adopted the space. She didn't have a grand plan. She had a feeling.

She named it Nowhere Bookstore - Fei Di in Chinese, which translates roughly as enclave: a place that belongs to one world but exists inside another, like West Berlin flickering inside a divided continent. The English name came from something more personal.

Then Annie said, "I literally had nowhere to go. But I can start from now, here."

Annie has continued to say yes to opportunities from communities eager to establish the Nowhere Library around the world. It now has spaces as well in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC

Books You Can Only Read Outside China

The Nowhere Bookstore is not simply a place to buy books. It is a curatorial act of resistance.

Think about what it means to hold a book that your country has decided you cannot read.

Not a book that is hard to find, or out of print, or simply unpopular. A book that has been judged, by a government, by a censor, by an algorithm trained to catch dangerous ideas, to be too truthful, too tender, or too free to be allowed inside a border. A book whose existence, in the wrong hands, in the wrong place, is considered a threat.

The shelves of Nowhere Bookstore are full of them.

They include books documenting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, written by participants who marched, were detained, or later left the region. There are works of LGBTQ literature that cannot be legally published or distributed in mainland China, where such material is officially categorised in limiting ways. There are feminist writings, texts on decolonisation, and accounts of the Cultural Revolution told from viewpoints not included in official narratives. These are subjects that are not only considered sensitive in mainland China but are also subject to active restriction.

And then, there are the Cantonese books.

Cantonese is spoken by roughly 85 million people worldwide, yet it has no official status in mainland China, where Mandarin is the language of power, education, and national identity. In Hong Kong itself, the historic heartland of the language, Cantonese is under quiet but sustained pressure.

Young people educated under the new curriculum encounter less of it in school. The cultural productions that gave it vitality: the films, the music, the irreverent humour of a city that refused to be serious, much of that has been scattered or silenced.

At Nowhere, Cantonese books are not shelved in a heritage corner or treated as artefacts of a dying tongue. They are stocked, ordered, replenished. People come in, pick them up, read passages aloud to each other. The act of browsing them is itself a form of refusal, a refusal to let the language drift quietly into the past.

When Annie began telling the story of what the bookstore held and why, the response surprised her. The calls didn't just come from Hong Kongers. They came from mainland Chinese people too, many of them shaken loose from their certainties by the COVID lockdowns, particularly the brutal shutdown of Shanghai, which confined millions to their apartments for months and made the machinery of state control impossible to ignore or explain away.

"Before, it was easy to know the privileged ones to the victims. But during the lockdown, it put everyone in the victim's position. So, people began to understand other victims' experience," she explained.

For many of them, Nowhere Bookstore was the first place they encountered books that named what they had felt but could not say. Not because they had been unaware that censorship existed, everyone knows , but because seeing the books physically present, available, readable, made the absence back home suddenly legible. You cannot miss what you have never seen. These people had seen it now.

Dominion Road: The Corner That Said Yes

On Dominion Road, the centre of Auckland’s Asian community, where decades of migrant life have shaped the city’s culture through its restaurants, shops, and everyday stories, a small group of women found themselves returning to a familiar question: why doesn’t Auckland have a Chinese‑language bookstore?

The answer was obvious. The gap was enormous. The conversation quickly became a plan.

Crystal, one of the founders of Nowhere Auckland, came to the project after more than a decade in New Zealand. She had spent much of that time, she says honestly, doing what most migrants do - fitting in. Absorbing the unwritten rules. Setting aside the parts of herself that didn't translate neatly into the new country.

"There's this internalised narrative, that if you want to make it as a migrant, you need to fit into whatever society this is," she said.

The Nowhere Bookstore offered a different proposition. Not assimilation by erasure, but something the Auckland team calls hybrid belonging, retaining your identity while planting yourself in new soil. For Crystal and her friends, reading about what Nowhere stood for in Taipei was a kind of recognition. "What they stand for, what their stories are, it really resonated," she says.

The Auckland store started as a three-month pop-up on K Road last year.

The shelves are stocked mostly with books from Taiwan - traditional Chinese titles, many unavailable in mainland China - alongside titles from Hong Kong, local New Zealand publications, and a curated selection of international works.

The library is not only for reading, events and workshops are held regularly. Plans are underway to expand to Wellington and Christchurch. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC

Safe Space in a Democratic Country

There is a question that hangs in the air around a project like this: New Zealand is a democracy. Freedom of speech is not just permitted here, it is protected. So why would anyone feel unsafe speaking freely?

The answer, Crystal explains, is that it isn't New Zealand that makes people feel unsafe.

"It's more that China is not democratic," she says. "A lot of us have Chinese citizenship. Even saying something overseas might put us in a very risky situation."

New Zealand has grappled publicly in recent years with the question of foreign interference — how governments with long arms and longer memories can make their citizens feel watched, reported on, and at risk, even on the other side of the world. For many members of Auckland's Chinese community, the fear is not hypothetical.

"If you get posted on social media, if you get reported," Crystal says, "there are a lot of risks carried on to it."

Nowhere Auckland is, in this sense, more than a bookstore. It is a room where the walls don't have ears. A place where you can speak Cantonese, read a banned novel, or simply exist in your own language without calculating the cost.

Since opening, the Auckland store has already begun to feel like something more than a shop. Regulars are returning. Faces are becoming familiar. Events, at least one per weekend during the pop-up phase, and ongoing now, have drawn speakers and collaborators that the team never expected, many of them introduced by customers who simply walked in.

"Ideally, it's not our bookstore," says one of the team. "It's the community bookstore."

The reach has surprised even its founders. When they took a market stall to Christchurch and Queenstown, testing whether the need extended beyond Auckland, they found people changing their shifts just to make it to the market. Non-Asian Kiwis buying books. Locals who had not considered themselves part of any Chinese cultural community discovering that they were.

It is, quite literally, just the start. The Auckland team is already in conversation about bringing Nowhere to Wellington and Christchurch, making it not merely a bookstore on Dominion Road, but a thread running through Aotearoa, connecting communities that share a language, a history, or simply a longing for a place to think out loud.

Nowhere Bookstore Auckland is located on Karangahape Road. Its collection includes books banned in mainland China, Cantonese-language titles, and works on decolonisation, gender, and liberation. Photo: Carla Teng-Westergaard/AMC

Now Here

Annie sits easily with uncertainty. She has lived in it long enough to know it doesn't have to mean paralysis. She has no fixed plan, no organisational chart, no funding from any government. What she has is a network of people who heard a story and recognised themselves in it, and a model lean enough to survive on one and a half full-time workers per city.

"I'm just staying at home," she says, "and getting calls from different young people in different cities around the world."

She spent the first months of her exile feeling watched with pity at dinner tables, friends asking 'How is Hong Kong?' in a tone that expected no real answer. The bookstore gave her something to say. More than that, it gave her back the thing that journalists need most: agency. She was no longer only a person things had happened to.

She had somewhere to go. She had built it herself, one adopted space at a time, in the cities where her people had scattered and were trying to remember who they were.

In Auckland, a team of women heard that story and decided to build the same thing, not because someone told them to, but because the need was real and the shelves were empty and Dominion Road, of all places, was waiting.

The books are there now. The community is forming. And Nowhere, improbably, is everywhere.

-Asia Media Centre