After 10 Years Running an Independent Bookstore, She Built a "Paid Interest Group" to Read With People | Great Little Studios

What Gao Lu does comes out of passion, and is hard to replicate.

At 9:30 a.m. on December 15, 2018, in a residential building in Shanghai's Xuhui District, a lecture called "How to Look at a Painting" took up the calligraphy and painting of Dong Qichang. It was one in a series of events built around Precious Raft of Painting: The Grand Exhibition of Dong Qichang's Calligraphy and Painting (《丹青宝筏——董其昌书画艺术大展》), then running at the Shanghai Museum.

The lecturer, Gao Lu, had designed a four-month program that combined several formats — guided talks, seeing the exhibition, review sessions, reading, and a field trip. Four people came that day; two more, who hadn't managed to get out of bed, listened in over WeChat. That morning Gao Lu wrote in the WeChat group, "You lazy bunch." In the afternoon she took the four who had shown up to the Shanghai Museum to see the Dong Qichang show.

Gao Lu is better known for an earlier role — owner of Dukou Bookstore. It was a shop of just over 50 square meters that ran for ten years on Julu Road, starting in 2007. In 2016, with sales at physical bookstores falling and rent rising, Dukou moved into a residential complex on Xikang Road. There it worked mainly as an event space, hosting the "Ferryman" lecture series, in which people from different fields talked about their work (film festival programmers, staff from international nonprofits and Doctors Without Borders, boxers, and others), along with exhibitions and exchanges run with Artron Art Books. At the end of 2016, Dukou moved into the apartment in Xuhui District where it sits now, and stopped opening to the public.

In early 2017, Gao Lu began organizing themed learning programs: the art-appreciation series "Ways of Seeing," "Kingdom of Chinese Characters," the "Magic Mirror" psychology group, a monthly book club, "Dukou Wanders," and an event called "Developing Dong Qichang."

More than a decade behind a counter taught Gao Lu that selling books does not get people to read them. "Most bookstores just put the books out there, and even the people who buy them don't necessarily read them." Dukou Bookstore once made a list of "10 Independent Bookstores You Must Visit in Shanghai," but Gao Lu says the fame mostly brought tourists — some walked in, took a photo to check in, and left, "without so much as glancing at a book." That disappointed her, and the bookstore turned into something hard to categorize: regular themed learning programs, with the themes set by Gao Lu. She wanted to get people reading through action, not by stacking books on a shelf.

Over the two years after 2017, Gao Lu felt her way through a handful of programs.

The first was Changing Images: Around 1900. Every Sunday evening for half a year, she led the group through 20th-century modern art. The program coincided with "Masters of Modern Art from the Centre Pompidou" at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, and she used its 71 works to walk through a century of movements and artists. She called the series "Ways of Seeing," after John Berger's 1970s BBC program. On Dukou Bookstore's Zhihu account she wrote: "Being drawn to something by instinct is the first step toward understanding and exploring it. Understanding it further means putting the work back into the context that produced it, and comparing and thinking about it alongside other works, across and down — which deepens understanding, widens your view, and sharpens the pleasure of coming back to it again and again."

"Friday Movie Night" started around the same time. During a film month in March 2017 themed "Isabelle Huppert — Beyond Accuracy," the group watched films Gao Lu had picked, using the viewing and the discussion to change how they watched movies and to find possible links between unrelated things. But Gao Lu was doing everything herself, and the series ran only once.

At the end of 2017 she started the "Magic Mirror" psychology group, a year of study across 48 sessions. Some years earlier, prompted by her own confusion and her friends', she had picked up scraps of psychology from Zhihu answers. She wanted a systematic grasp of how the brain works, so she chewed through books for three months and designed a full course herself. She divided the 48 sessions into four units: "The Self," "The Biological Person," "The Developing Person," and "The Person in Relationships." Each unit covered about ten concepts or topics over three months, with one or two discussion sessions built in. The reading list ran to 12 books, plus Yale's open courses and Discovering Psychology, the television series hosted by Philip Zimbardo. The first round finished in early January; the second is on its second unit.

The "Kingdom of Chinese Characters" series, which goes back to the Xikang Road years, is now split into three grade levels. Through explanation, discussion, appreciation, reading, and writing by hand, it helps people learn how characters are written and build their own way of appreciating, understanding, and judging them.

The monthly book club uses the group-reading mode on NetEase Snail Reading, working through one or two related books a week. Gao Lu sets the list, with each theme running four or five weeks. Since the club started in September 2018, its four rounds have covered Homo Ludens, "The Self," Sense and Sensibility versus The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and a nature theme, "A Week on the River."

Gao Lu does all of this alone. She takes part in every step herself, from the idea for a theme to the course design, the teaching, and the discussion. A typical week: book club on Friday evening, the Dong Qichang lecture and a visit to the exhibition on Saturday, sometimes a calligraphy class on Saturday too, the first-round psychology class Saturday evening, and the second-round psychology class Sunday morning.

On weekdays she reads and goes through research material in the morning, deals with work talk in the afternoon, and runs the week's scheduled sessions in the evenings and on weekends. It is still a little better than the bookstore. Running a bookstore was never as romantic as it looks; administrative chores once ate more than 80% of her time.

Teaching and keeping herself stocked with new material take nearly all of Gao Lu's energy. Her courses average about ten students a round, and the total who have been through them so far comes to 40 or 50 people.

The book club on December 21 was themed "Nature." Nobody who logged on had read the two books Gao Lu had set in the group-reading mode — Thoreau's Walking and Cheng Hong's Thirty Lectures on American Nature Writing. The session was scheduled for an hour, and at one point no one knew what to say next. Gao Lu said again and again that she was disappointed and did not understand.

A lot of things puzzle her. She finds it strange that "Chinese people have no urge to explore first principles." She is unsure who books are for now: "Everyone says only the government can afford to open a bookstore, but the real problem is that nobody reads — nobody needs the thing at all." "People give up halfway. Attention is too scattered these days." A few students did speak up in this session; one asked why curiosity about nature wears away as people grow up.

Gao Lu names people's slacking in class: "It's like a war where the ammunition and the food have run out. Everyone's got nothing left." Her courses do ask a lot — reading and thinking between sessions, sometimes preparation beforehand. Without your own thinking, there is nothing to exchange in class. And if you can't stay with it and only listen passively, in fragments, you won't reach the goals Gao Lu has set.

Sometimes, though, the classroom catches fire. During the first psychology round, for instance, the group held a "psychology lunch." It wasn't in the original plan; a student from Wuxi proposed it. In the end everyone took the high-speed train to Wuxi for a two-day, one-night outdoor class, where each of them talked about "the biggest change in my life."

What Gao Lu is doing is hard to define. It looks like a set of "products," but it is unlike the courses that sell online: it barely replicates. The courses have clear goals, but no fixed route to them. In the second half of 2017 she was teaching Cézanne, and in one session she used shots from Dunkirk, then in theaters, to talk about landscape painting, and from there explained Cézanne's style and how it developed.

Notes taken by Li Ziyao, one of the participants, show that in that session Gao Lu went from seascape films to Whistler and film composition, then to landscape painting before Cézanne, comparing Chinese and Western landscape traditions along the way, bringing in painters' disabilities to talk about breakthrough and self-mastery, and circling back to Dunkirk to discuss its light.

Li Ziyao still finds that class startling to recall: "It went so wide and so deep, and so much of it connected up." Other students in the group felt the same rush of things falling into place afterward: "Unexpected — putting landscape painting next to that film was the biggest surprise of all."

Seen from one angle, what Gao Lu runs is closer to a "paid interest group." The people who come already have some idea of what they want to learn. They call her "Teacher Gao" or "Principal Gao," and some just say "Gao Lu," but she thinks her role is closer to "coach" — "coach means you're expected to produce results." And rather than call the people in the group "trainees," she prefers "classmates": it is a process everyone learns through together. Even as the one talking, she learns more by teaching.

By Gao Lu's own count, the average age in her interest groups is around 35, five years older than she expected. She sees them as people whose lives have settled: "Before 35, life is mostly about getting along with social norms. You don't have the energy for this yet." Because most of them have some experience behind them, they also come in with clearer expectations. Instead of the knowledge that was funneled into them at school, they want a method and a new angle — and they weigh whether they accept these ideas, which arrive filtered through Gao Lu's own understanding.

Lynn, who came from Hangzhou for the Dong Qichang program, put it this way: "A teacher's job is to open a window for you, give you a method, tell you how to get the thing you want done — not to walk you through it step by step."

What stayed with another participant, Helen, was a way into an unfamiliar field: "If you're interested in a field — Chinese painting and calligraphy, say — you can grab hold of the key figures and events, then build out from there. Getting the whole thread that way is a fairly efficient method."

Next to online courses that plan out every minute and every point of knowledge, Gao Lu's classes look somewhat "loose." Not because she is underprepared, but because she wants to say too much, and the emphasis sometimes blurs. Lynn signed up after a friend shared one of Gao Lu's events on Moments; the Dong Qichang exhibition was what drew her. She had also studied calligraphy online with Lin Xi of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Set against the clarity of Lin Xi's course design and the precision of her scheduling, Gao Lu's use of class time and her equipment for guided viewing are not yet up to it.

Gao Lu's classes keep shifting — partly as her own knowledge widens, partly as the pace changes after talking with students. Li Ziyao says Gao Lu's Dong Qichang lectures get "closer to perfect every time." In all that shifting, the biggest difference from an online course is the exchange: she asks people in class how they understand something, and shares relevant videos and articles in the group chat as she finds them. As Li Ziyao put it: "Even if she doesn't get it across perfectly the first time, she keeps looking for ways to say what she's worked out more clearly."

To Li Ziyao, the interaction in Gao Lu's classroom is what most separates it from a product. "A product is relatively fixed, a process out of a mold. Gao Lu is always updating, and updating fast, and she's good at looking back at herself." What Gao Lu is really doing, in her view, is "getting people to form their own understanding, rather than read a book."

Asked whether the themed programs are a continuation of Dukou, Gao Lu neither agreed nor disagreed. "Or you could say it's the thing I should have been doing all along, something like an invisible school. The bookstore no longer exists in substance, so 'continuation' doesn't quite join up either. Going forward it will probably still run under the name 'Dukou Bookstore,' with a new meaning attached to it."

Gao Lu can look permanently disappointed that people no longer read, but she holds out hope for the very climate that disappoints her. This is how she understands what she does: "I should do this. It's worth doing. Someone should do it, and I'm willing to be that person."

Cover image and banner from the Douban page for the film The Bookshop; the long cover image is from Pexels, cropped.