Bookworm Manager David Cantalupo Looks Back on 30 Years in China

原创 Kyle M. theBeijinger

David Cantalupo hasn’t been in Beijing so long as to have taken a slow boat to China, but he did, in fact, once take one back to the US. Decades before his current role as general manager of The Bookworm, and long before his pioneering stint as managing director in China for ESPN, Cantalupo recalls his typhoon-lashed trek as a toddler, where “my mother was seasick in bed, and I was sitting on the floor playing with blocks that kept toppling over.”

During a recent sun-soaked afternoon, he sits on The Bookworm's rooftop terrace, hand-rolling cigarettes from a baggie of tobacco and puffing away while recounting how his 30-year adventure in China began. Actually, that decade-spanning story began even earlier, before he was even born. Cantalupo’s father, a second generation Italian from New Jersey, was given a language aptitude test while serving in the US Air Force on account of the service’s desperate need for Chinese translators. He scored high enough to be shipped off to Yale for an intensive course, then to Taiwan to listen in on communist Chinese radio communications.

David Cantalupo has spent 30 years in China

Following his discharge, Cantalupo’s father went back home to New Jersey and continued his Chinese studies at Seton Hall University, where he met his would-be wife, a Taiwanese national studying nursing, and the daughter of a high-ranking Kuomintang official who sent her “to be a backdoor to the US if Taiwan should fall.” While the couple hit it off immediately and married quickly, things soured when Cantalupo’s father lost enough of their savings at the horse track to drive Cantalupo’s mother back to Taiwan, toddler in tow.

Thankfully, within a few years, his father had sufficiently changed his gambling ways to prompt their return via stormy seas. Cantalupo spent his childhood in New Jersey until he turned 16, when the family took a year-long sabbatical back to Taipei and Cantalupo enrolled at a Chinese boarding school. Looking back, he says: “I failed everything, with the exception of English, which I did not get the highest grades in because it was all grammar-based. But it was an amazing year for me.”

I failed everything, with the exception of English, which I did not get the highest grades in because it was all grammar-based. But it was an amazing year for me.

Cantalupo loved it so much that years later, while enrolled at Georgetown University, he asked his well-connected advisor to pull some strings until he landed an English teaching job at a university in Wuhan in 1986. He ventured to Beijing from there, staying at an RMB 8 per night youth hostel near Yongdingmen. “While all the other backpackers were heading out to the Great Wall, I’d put a stack of resumes and a sports jacket in the basket of a bicycle and ride off to look for work,” Cantalupo recalls fondly.

During a decade stint at a Fortune 500 company, Cantalupo married his wife, a local Beijinger working in the film industry. Noticing the growing interest in sports in China, at one point he told her: “’Sports isn’t political, it’s got a better future here.’ Of course, I was totally wrong.” Still, she indulged him and he snagged a gig at a marketing and media company and was successful enough there to prompt a headhunter from ESPN Star Sports to poach him in 2000. As much as he loved his five years at the broadcasting company, he says his higher-ups squandered a deal with the NBA, just as Yao Ming was on the rise. It was one of many snafus that prompted Cantalupo to move on.

A lifelong sports fan, Cantalupo had a pioneering stint as managing director in China for ESPN in the early 2000's

During his (comparatively lucrative) glory days at ESPN, however, Cantalupo describes he helped his friend and fellow Old China Hand Alexandra Pearson turn her lending library into The Bookworm. At the time, Pearson had temporary setups at one Beijing pub after another like Le Petit Gourmand. While Cantalupo attended a book talk there, Cantalupo told her: “I’m a sports guy, I watch TV. But I like pretending that I’m well read, so I come for the fun stuff like book talks. Meanwhile, the bar that’s housing you is selling me beer, and you’re not getting a penny. Your business model is f**ked.”

I’m a sports guy, I watch TV. But I like pretending that I’m well read, so I come for the fun stuff like book talks. Meanwhile, the bar that’s housing you is selling me beer, and you’re not getting a penny. Your business model is f**ked.

So Pearson scouted The Bookworm’s location, while Cantalupo put up most of the funds. Other investors included Peter Goff (a journalist and devotee of Pearson’s private library who went on to become co-owner). It was an instant hit upon opening in 2005, so much so that Goff headed up new branches in Chengdu and Suzhou. Cantalupo calls Pearson “a visionary” when it came to events, especially the Literary Festival. But he says she grew disenchanted with the F&B side, especially as competition mounted in the ensuing years, which partially prompted her eventual departure. And, rather than continuing to split his time between the three locations, Goff gradually turned operations in Beijing over to Cantalupo last year.

“People want us to succeed, we just need to do a better job of addressing the changing market,” Cantalupo says. That strategy involves plenty of book talks and other events like standup sets, along with a menu revamp and other flourishes, not to mention a bigger marketing push. The smash success of this year’s Literary Festival, which skipped a year due to financial woes, certainly gives The Bookworm promising momentum now that Cantalupo has taken the reins. As he puts it: “The potential here is fantastic.” Just keep in mind that this new Bookworm manager might want to sometimes talk hoops over the classics.