To most he would be an elderly man intently reading a Chinese newspaper in a storefront window. But anyone who stops in the Peking Book House knows better.
C.C. Cheng puts down his newspaper and turns on the lights in his store. He gives each new visitor a quick tour: martial arts, Taoism, acupuncture, history. Chinese language books are in the back room and in boxes and stacks among the shelves.
“This is a one-man store all the time,” said Cheng, a slight man with dark gray hair and an almost permanent smile.
Cheng’s store is one of a number of small businesses that have been affected by redevelopment in Evanston in the past few years.
He first opened the store 32 years ago at 1520 Sherman Ave. After 30 years his landlord turned the space into a restaurant, and Cheng moved the store to 803 Chicago Ave., just before his new landlord sold the property to a developer. So in May, Cheng moved again, this time to 2131 W. Howard St., just across the border from Evanston in Chicago.
Many businesses near redeveloping areas face the problem of increasing rents, even before redevelopment begins, said Dick Peach, president of the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.
“A lot of those landlords have jacked (up) rents on people and forced those businesses to move elsewhere,” Peach said. Large companies tend to be more willing to pay high rent for a prime location, he said.
Peach said independent businesses might face problems when looking for new locations, but Cheng is characteristically relaxed about his store’s recent moves.
“I like it here better because the high ceiling and open front have made me feel better,” he said.
always a journalist
Visitors willing to sit and talk will learn Cheng is a journalist, scholar and founder of a chain of bookstores in China.
He was born in 1926 in a small agricultural town in China. As he grew up, Cheng developed an interest in journalism.
In college Cheng founded a hand-copied weekly newspaper. Unlike other papers, which he said were mostly ideological and political, Cheng said his was a “real newspaper,” focused on local news.
When the Communist Party of China took power in 1949, Cheng and 40 of his classmates fled the mainland for Taiwan. Once on the island, he became a reporter for a regional newspaper.
Cheng finished college and moved to the United States to pursue journalism further.
For a year beginning in 1957, he studied journalism at the University of Missouri. The next year he left Missouri for Chicago to be close to Wilmette’s North American temple of the Bah
