ZHENGZHOU, April 23 (Xinhua) -- Li Cuili opens her shop each morning as usual. The small grocery store is located beside a main road in a farming village in Henan Province, central China. Passing vehicles raise dust at the entrance, while drivers occasionally stop to purchase bottled water.
A few steps inside the shop, in a space of about 20 square meters, bookcases cover three walls. Some children sit shoulder to shoulder, reading newly arrived picture books.
Li grew up in the village, but few would have expected that she would one day make reading part of everyday life here.
The idea came from a moment of shock 18 years ago. One spring evening in 2008, a traveling troupe came to the village. Li, then in her twenties, went with her young daughter to watch.
The performers turned classic Chinese poems into crude jokes, even involving children in the audience. The next day, children in the village were heard repeating the jokes.
"It felt like something hit my heart," Li recalled.
She remembered a fable: if you want to remove weeds from a field, the best way is to plant crops there.
So Li decided to plant something of her own. She opened a reading corner in her family's shop -- no membership cards, no fees. She even replaced a shelf of the most profitable products, bottles of strong white liquor with more than 200 books.
She named the corner "Glimmer Book Nook."
Neighbors thought she had lost her mind. Others joked that she had fallen for a pyramid scheme. Not surprisingly, villagers walked past the books on their way to buy soy sauce or laundry powder, barely giving them a glance.
Then Li tried something simple: children who borrowed a book would get a piece of candy.
This approach was an instant success. Children began arriving in groups. They told one another that "reading is sweet."
Slowly, reading became part of village life. Sometimes children would encourage their parents to accompany them, making reading a family activity. For a long time, more people came to read than to shop.
As the number of readers grew, Li needed more books. In the early years, books were hard to find. She once pooled 1,000 yuan, roughly her father's monthly salary at the time, to buy new books in the county town. But she came back with 300 second-hand books, as the money had not been enough for even 30 new ones.
Another time she bought cheap pirated books, only to find mistakes after a child pointed them out. She destroyed the entire batch.
Her family members quietly supported her. Her mother once gave her 500 yuan earned from weaving straw hats. Her sisters always brought books when they came to visit her.
In 2015, Li was invited to a forum for grassroots libraries in Beijing. It was the first time she realized that others across China were also building small community libraries in rural areas.
"Is mine really a library?" she asked.
"Yes," came the answer. "It's a library inside a shop."
Gradually, more and more people joined in. The village doctor shared medical books and retired teachers began helping children with their homework.
Over the years, the library has recorded more than 400,000 borrowing visits.
Among those readers are children whose lives have quietly changed. One girl, who initially borrowed books in order to receive candy, later read a biography of Marie Curie and has since gone on to university. Another child, who once said she wanted to own a shop when she grew up, now hopes to run a store like Li's, with books available on the shelves.
Today, books are no longer a problem as more donations arrive. The reading space has been improved. The library is now linked to the local public library system. It also offers health lectures and sessions on avoiding scams.
As the village's elderly population grows, Glimmer Book Nook has launched a new activity: "mutual help between the old and the young." The elderly tell children stories about the village's history, folk tales and their own hard-working past. Children teach the elderly how to use smartphones and help with small chores.
In Li's eyes, the interaction between the generations is a beautiful meeting across time.
Following the model of Glimmer Book Nook, 400 "one-square-meter bookshelves" have now been set up across China, according to Li.
"I haven't read many books. But I believe that rural areas also need the light of culture. I want to keep promoting reading in the countryside." ■
