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Accent Sisters New York

 Accent Sisters is perhaps the best-known multilingual bookstore among Chinese diasporic cultural workers. Started from a writing community “重音社 Accent Society” on WeChat in 2019, Accent Sisters grew out of a desire to share resources and find resonance with those writing in a second language. By 2022, it had expanded into a bookstore, publisher, exhibition space, and workshop site, creating a gathering place for Chinese-speaking artists, writers, musicians, and students that move fluidly between online and physical worlds.

From its first space in a Jersey City building full of artist studios, to a pop-up basement known as “Accent Temple” in Chinatown, to its current location in a mixed-use complex near Union Square, Accent Sisters has retained its vibrant, girlish character while gently supporting the feminist and queer communities around it. Alongside literature-focused classes, talks, and workshops, its programming often embraces a sense of playfulness—crochet clubs, fortune-telling sessions, and salons for dialect learning—bringing people from across backgrounds and speaking to their experience. 



Jiaoyang Li, Alison Long, Yindi Chen, Yutong Shi, April 12, 2026

Yindi    

How would you describe Accent Sisters?

Jiaoyang    

Crazy? Anti-institution… A girl space. 

Alison    

We started with a literature-based community—I wasn’t there, but I believe Jiaoyang started with a creative writing circle, right? And then it attracted a community of people in culture and arts. I think that’s important because it sets the foundation of Accent being a very communal space. We do what inspires us and those in the community. So it's not about commercial success, or what people think a big institution does. It's just for our friends. It's unique that Accent is fun-based.  

Yutong    

Why called “Accent”?

Jiaoyang    

We brainstormed so many names, but we decided on Accent because all the writers here are writing in their second language, not using “standard” English. People from Sichuan, like Fang Shangyang, would always joke: “I have a Sichuan accent, even when I’m speaking English.” It’s like turning a joke into a brand. For the Chinese name, we chose 重音 because it carries a double meaning—zhòng yīn means a strong voice, and chóng yīn means a doubled or layered voice. In English, “Accent” works the same way: it can mean the particular accent you carry in your speech, or it can mean a diacritical mark, an emphasis, a distinguishing quality. It mirrors our identity. We are not speaking in standard English—but we are bringing something unique, strong, and plural.

Yutong    

Before having the physical space, how did it all start?

Jiaoyang    

We started in 2019, when I was just graduating from the MFA in Critical Writing. Both my co-founder Na Zhong and I were the only Chinese students in our respective writing programs, and we would occasionally get inquiries from Douban, “How do you feel about writing in a second language? I'm also interested in this but feel scared.” We wanted to create a space to gather all these people, share resources and ideas. We named it Accent Society and started with a WeChat account.
        During the pandemic, we got a grant from the British Council to organize a year-long online residency and a series of workshops focusing on interdisciplinary poetry, inviting people from different backgrounds to elaborate on what poetry is for them. At a moment when people felt very lonely and really needed a space to gather and produce their work, that became the grounding of how we started. At that time, we never thought about having a physical space. We did host some events, but always in collaboration with other organizations—like 456 Gallery, the home of Chinese American Art Council, Pink Fog, a café in Williamsburg, and several galleries and organizations . It was always here and there.

Yutong    

Since you mentioned Douban—which was such an important platform for many millennials growing up in China, but now feels somewhat replaced by RedNote for younger generations—and considering Accent itself began through WeChat and online workshops and residencies, I’m curious: how have online platforms shaped diasporic cultural production and the formation of the Accent community?

Jiaoyang    

We've definitely noticed the audience shift from WeChat and Douban to Xiaohongshu, which is disheartening—people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and deep, long-form content struggles to survive recommendation algorithms. To give our events and programs the visibility they deserve, we've started begging our youngest intern to write clickbait-style copy suited for Xiaohongshu. It's quite painful for us. But we have no choice. We have to adapt to how things are changing. The upside is that Xiaohongshu is genuinely more accessible to a general audience—a lot of people who don't normally read books discover our events through it.
        At the same time, our audience is now about 40% local Americans, so Instagram and our official website have become equally important channels. This makes our workflow incredibly difficult, because it's hard to find staff who are fully fluent in both Chinese and English social media contexts—and ensuring that every event and program is completely archived across platforms is something we can rarely pull off.
        So every time someone—Chinese or American—tells me they couldn't attend one of our events because of a language barrier or a payment issue, I feel it again: we are living in the cracks.

Yutong    

Why did you feel the need to have your own physical space in 2022?  

Jiaoyang    

It's all by accident. I met my second co-founder Hongru at Latitude Gallery, where I was having a solo show branded as a poet's artwork. Hongru came by because of poetry, and was like, “I didn't know there's another Chinese poet in New York. I thought I was the only one.” She told me her dream was to open a bookstore, and for a moment, it seemed possible: a friend had offered us a small space in Tribeca for free. But the plan didn’t work out, as his plan shifted from a restaurant to a Chinese kindergarten. We cannot open an independent bookstore near a kindergarten as we sell crazy books. 
        Meanwhile, Na Zhong’s friend encouraged us to apply for this Y Combinator grant. We did a one month research and answered a very long questionnaire about why we need a bookstore for Chinese diasporic readers in New York.
        But we didn’t get the grant. They said, oh, you beat up like 90% of other people, but we only invest in tech companies. At that time, we felt so ready to open the bookstore—we just didn't have the space, money, or anything. Then I was still living in New Jersey, and while walking back home, I saw this big advertisement for a cheap rental space that was being converted from storage units into artist studios. I discussed it with Hongru, and we started from there.

Yindi    

Why did you think it was necessary to have a Chinese bookstore in New York? What kind of Chinese bookstores were there before Accent Sisters? 

Jiaoyang    

Mostly because New York has the biggest Chinese population in the world outside of Asia. And every time we do workshops and in-person events, so many people register.
       There are many traditional Chinese bookstores. The one I really like is Eastern Bookstore (東方書店) in Chinatown, owned by a Hong Kong person. There was another one called 中国风 owned by my uncle’s friend. He's an old editor from a Shanghai publisher and immigrated there and opened the bookstore for 31 years. He didn't sell coffee or anything else but books. I really respect them.

Yindi    

What shapes your bookstore’s identity that is different from the traditional ones? 

Jiaoyang    

We only sell books we would like to read. We don’t care about the market or if other people like it. It’s also tiny, so it's just like a bookstore in your bedroom or living room. And because we're all writers, there are more independent publishers that we like to promote. Well, they're mostly not best—even worst—sellers in the market, but we like them. They are long-lasting books instead of best selling books.

Yutong    

What kinds of books, writers, or aesthetics do you think are missing from mainstream Chinese or Asian American bookstores?

Jiaoyang    

To be honest, if I were living in China, I probably wouldn’t open a bookstore—because there are already so many good ones. 方所 in Guangzhou, for example, is a mainstream Chinese bookstore, but it carries a tremendous range of foreign literature, including titles from indie presses like Fitzcarraldo and others. I wouldn't feel the need to carve out a self-consciously niche or independent space, because their buyers are already doing that work, and doing it surprisingly well.
        In New York, there are two other Asian American bookstores—Yu and Me Books and Yellow Peril Books—and they're both doing wonderful work centering Asian American voices.
        So I can't claim to represent the mainstream. I can only speak to what is missing for me. I want to read work that crosses between languages and forms, that lives somewhere between the art theory, artist book, and the experimental literary work, made by people who live across more than one country and speak more than one language. I want to place my friend's book—one I know is good—next to the legendary writers I love, because I want us to live inside our own structure and order, instead of getting validation from the outside world.

Yindi    

When you described Accent Sisters, you mentioned “girl”, now a controversial word in talking about females, but what do you think of this girlish vibe at Accent Sisters?

Jiaoyang    

We always want to focus on a kind of image that Accent is a group of hot girls who read books. The Asian American literary industry always wants to make Asian people look like “immigrants.” You're immigrants, so you're the first generation of college students, and you always look poor and have to write about your grandmother. We want to prevent that kind of trauma fever and show a new generation of girls who are feminist and cool.

Alison    

When you call it Accent Sisters, the “sisters” makes me think of a convent. So it's more like solidarity—I'm not saying it's necessarily religious, but it does have a culty vibe. Accent has also done a side project, Accent Temple. And there's a kind of—not a spiritual reason, but sort of an ideology—that you congregate around. 

Yindi    

In what way do you think your background or practice is related to the making of Accent Sisters?

Jiaoyang    

I always wanted to do a PhD, but I didn't because of the pandemic and also that PhD is a very realistic thing. In the US, you have to take so many classes; and in the UK, you have to pay for your PhD. I think mostly I found Accent as a continuing education program for myself. In that way, I could develop classes I like. I'm writing poetry now, I definitely want to write fiction the other day and then do visual art next week. Accent give us the opportunity to work with professionals from different backgrounds. 

Alison    

I never went to school for the things I like to do. But during my Master’s, I did eventually find my interest, and it was serendipitous. I started off as a social science major, but I'm trying to build more academic research around the field of digital humanities and cultural studies around technology. There are people doing academic study on fandom culture and online subculture communities. And Accent is like a living artifact of this type of community.
        I also worked a little bit with the Center for Book Arts on a school related project. There were very grassroots zine publications and distributors who popped up and then disappeared. There's always a lot of work to be done in terms of archiving and pulling all these data and people's names together. 

Yutong    

Listening to you both talk about fandom culture, online communities, and interdisciplinary practices, I’m wondering: do you think Accent could only emerge from a millennial or post-90s Chinese diaspora generation?

Jiaoyang    

I don’t know, and I don’t know how long we’ll survive either. Interesting things emerge and close all the time—we’re just part of that conversation. We value what we can do right now, and we try to enjoy the moment.

Alison    

You know, I think each generation has their own version of Accent Sisters, or their own version of sub-cultural, cross-cultural, community-based, grassroot places of gathering. We hosted a series of performance art screenings called “Sinophone Action Arts on Film” with researchers Clone and Wenqi Chen. Sometimes audiences familiar with grassroot art collectives in the 90s find Accent’s vibe very endearing. I think “bookstore as a culture salon” is quite an old-timey idea. It makes me think of the 1920s. Or, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese diasporic characters in Pai Hsien-Yung’s New Yorkers may have had their own version of Accent. We may be circulating our event announcements on social media instead of on flyers and newspapers in the 2020s, but some things stay the same.

Yutong    

What kind of events do Accent Sisters organize now?

Alison    

I’d categorize our events into three types: book and literature events, hands-on arts and crafts workshops, and cultural events. For the cultural events, it really depends on who comes to us and what they pitch, but we generally look for themes we relate to—diaspora, community bonding, self-care. Sometimes it’s pertinent to international students and immigrant identity.
        There is also the focus on publishing and online classes. For publishing, we form partnerships with writers and develop book projects with them. Most of them are poetry and prose. Then for events, we host book launches, lit events, and poetry readings. And with the online classes, we have a really flourishing series of guest teachers that we invite from all over the place. A lot of them focus on creative writing. 
        We also do exhibitions. There are community-based exhibitions, and we do some open calls or sometimes we have other creators come in with their projects in mind, and we just sort of lend them the space. We also have the Fellowship program every season, and the fellows help out with that we’re already doing. Some fellows also end up curating an exhibition at Accent.

Jiaoyang    

For publishing, we mostly work with writers and publish very slowly. For the first year of Accent, we only published Yasmine Anlan Huang’s book. Then we worked with Jianan Qian on her project for so many years. Jianan’s translation has already been published by many big magazines, and she has won the O. Henry Award. But nobody picks this book because the publishers usually want to publish Chinese stories about the Cultural Revolution or other topics related to cultural identity. They are not very interested in experimental writing by Chinese writers. 

Yutong    

Do you think independent publishing creates a different kind of intimacy between writers and readers?

Jiaoyang    

Definitely—it's like a cult. Once you get involved in the indie publishing scene, you find that everyone is incredibly kind and supportive. We help each other distribute, get into book fairs, reach libraries, all of it. I think it's because we all know how hard it is—there's a real sense of 惺惺相惜, of recognizing yourself in someone else's struggle.

Yindi    

Accent is doing interdisciplinary things—what do you think of the interdisciplinarity and this intersection between art and literature?

Jiaoyang    

I never think there’s much difference between art and writing, especially for creative writing. Creating Writing is MFA at NYU—it’s already “fine art”, though many people think writing is not fine art. Writing is fine art. 
        The way we think about it: any act of making — whether it's an artwork or a piece of writing — happens in space. And once it happens in space, it becomes our territory. That's why our exhibitions always include poetry readings, and why we sometimes put the poems directly on the wall. It's about changing how you encounter the work by changing its medium. We also think of the space itself as a magazine — curating programs the way you'd curate an issue. And sometimes we flip that: a magazine that exists in space.

Alison    

I think what connects writing practices with the arts at Accent is storytelling. There are a lot of storytelling components in the exhibitions that we create, such as Charina Chen’s exhibition text of Reject Me Harder as a manifesto.

Yutong    

How does Accent work in terms of operational and financial structure? How does your space survive and sustain themself in a more long term way?

Jiaoyang    

For the first few years in Jersey, the rent was relatively low, so that was more manageable. When we moved to Manhattan, everything doubled or tripled. It’s so expensive. And now we have more people we work with. Although everyone gets paid really little, there still are costs.
       It’s not sustainable. We’re just putting in money all the time from our own savings and other stuff we do. We have some income from the online classes, but it all goes to the rent. 

Yutong    

What kinds of resources do you wish you had for this space?

Jiaoyang    

Our problem is that everyone thinks Accent is a non-profit organization, but we're actually for-profit in status. So we cannot apply for any grant. 
       There are some donors or sponsors giving the money because they trust this organization. They don’t ask for anything, just hope you can use the money to create more fun projects. But this is rare. This is like unconditional love. 

Yindi    

How can you balance your income and the labor of doing things that you really like?

Jiaoyang    

It’s really hard. I think it’s mostly sacrificing. For now I don’t get paid anything from Accent. I’m just doing it all these years for favor, but I don’t think it’s losing anything. It's not counted by the money stuff. 

Alison    

I have a day job. In the arts industry, if you wanna think very commercially, there are a lot of ways to do it. Just if we do think that way, we’re gonna take a lot of fun out of our own lives. 

Yindi    

What are some of your future plans for Accent?

Jiaoyang    

We’re in the process of incubating some new programs with other organizations—an Afro-Asian futurist dance battle in Bushwick, and a typewriter project and residency with the Poetry Society of New York. We’re also wrapping up our crime fiction open call with NOWNESS, and we’re about to publish the Asian women’s crime fiction anthology. We’re also planning to collaborate with more New York-based local magazines to host in-person events. We hope Accent remains a place for new ideas in progress.

Alison    

I just finished an exhibition about burnout and executive dysfunction and I'm looking to develop more curatorial projects that people in our generation may find relatable or controversial. 
       I’m researching online community studies and AI stuff—topics that come with a lot of tension or even guilt. In the past, we did a lot of projects and events in the humanities. But we do have a lot of audience that are also into conversations about tech and born-digital art-making, and it would be really interesting to invite those people in and make our events even more multidisciplinary.

Yindi    

Any art spaces you recommend?

Jiaoyang    

Shisanwu. It is a warehouse and project art space based in Queens. They make clothes from reclaimed materials and host fashion shows and art exhibitions right next to the shelving units — it’s just really wild. It taught me that art can happen anywhere, and that in a space like that, the work actually stands out more.

Alison    

Liz's Book Bar. They’re running a fully functional bookstore and a wine bar and also do coffee and pastry in Brooklyn.

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