Unbound, open since December in a former Chinese medicine shop on Waverly Place, is now Chinatown's only Chinese-language bookstore — filling a shelf that's been empty since three predecessors closed between 2020 and 2024.

The storefront at 38 Waverly Pl. — on the alley of temple associations between Clay and Sacramento streets — sold Chinese herbal medicine until last December, when a new tenant moved in. A sign permit filed with the city in March (permit 202603107286, now complete) made it official: the awning went up, and Chinatown had a bookstore again.

Unbound has been open since December, quietly — books, a coffee bar, walls where visitors wrote answers to questions posed by the owner, some of those answers now half-hidden behind bookshelves. It is currently the only independent Chinese-language bookstore in Chinatown, a slot that has been empty for a while. The Louie Brothers Book Store, at 754 Washington St. near Grant Avenue, closed in 2023 after 35 years. Eastwind Books & Arts, at 1435 Stockton St. on Card Alley, shut in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sino-American Books & Arts Co., a Chinese-language fixture at 3130 24th St. in the Mission, closed permanently in early 2024 after its owner — known to regulars as Mama Jiang — died.

The owner of Unbound, identified in Mission Local's reporting by the pseudonym Lala Huo (he requested the alias out of concern about censorship from mainland China), said the idea took shape in early 2024, around the time the last of those stores went dark. Huo is 30, arrived in the U.S. for college in 2010, and has spent the years since then stocking up on Chinese-language books during trips back to China or ordering in bulk from JD.com. Physical browsing, he told Mission Local, is different from scrolling an order page — you find books you didn't know you were looking for.

He structured Unbound as a for-profit LLC, deliberately, to give it multiple revenue streams: books (from U.S. independent publishers alongside titles from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), coffee, and crafts from local Asian artists. Tourists have been buying coffee and souvenirs; Chinatown regulars have been coming for the programming. There's a silent book club every Thursday, plus used-book exchanges, movie nights, and author talks. A recent event ended with the audience singing karaoke after a reading by short-story writer M Lin.

The community-space function is Huo's primary ambition. Finding a venue for Bay Area Chinese community events, he told Mission Local in Mandarin, always meant a scramble — public libraries book two months out, private venues charge, and events scatter across the region. "So we are hoping for a more modern, independent bookstore, that is also a public space," he said. "Not just a place filled with piles of books."

The formal grand opening is set for late June. Huo and Washington Post graphics journalist Youyou Zhou are building a timeline of Chinese immigration to San Francisco — Gold Rush and transcontinental railroad through later waves of students and white-collar workers — to be installed above the bookcases. Visitors will be invited to climb up and mark the year they arrived. The opening will include firecrackers, the traditional Chinese business ritual meant to announce the shop to the neighborhood.

The sign at 38 Waverly Pl. already does that. Anyone walking the alley can see it — the bookshelves visible just behind the glass.