Our book club is twenty years old, and it has only one rule

Our book club is twenty years old. The membership has turned over several times. There has only ever been one rule: do not judge what people read, only share what they found in it.

The rule was beaten out of us. At the start there were six of us, all literature types, and the meetings turned into a taste contest. Read a bestseller and you got teased. Read web fiction and you were nearly asked to leave. After the third meeting broke up in bad feeling, the founder, A Rong, laid down the rule and announced something subversive. The club would not recommend reading lists. Everyone would read whatever they wanted — cookbooks, comics, reference manuals, pulp — all of it equal. They only had to answer one question: what did this book make you think of?

The moment the rule existed, the character of the club changed.

A Qiang, who sells insurance, came for the first time and read aloud from a policy document. Everyone assumed he was going to pitch something. Instead he said, "I read a claims case and I thought about the year my father was ill and my family could not put the money together. I do this job because I don't want other people to go through that." Nobody talked about books that night. They talked about family for two hours. Afterwards A Qiang became the most loyal member.

Teacher Zhou, retired, read the Analects for three years and discussed one line a week. One night she reached "while your parents are alive, do not travel far," and as she talked she began to speak about her son in America, and the room went quiet. When the meeting ended, three other parents whose children were also far away gathered around her and talked until the restaurant closed.

Xiao Lin, a twenty-year-old intern, came last and read the "wrongest" things — game design bibles, sci-fi wiki pages. Some people worried the club was drifting. A Rong read the rule aloud again. Six months later Xiao Lin used the narrative structure of a video game to take apart how Dream of the Red Chamber plants its foreshadowing, and that night's discussion was voted, privately among the members, the best session of the year.

In twenty years the club has gone from six people to more than thirty. People come and go and come back. Someone got over a broken heart here. Someone finished their first serious book here. Someone treats it as a two-hour room to breathe in once a week. A Rong's summary: "In a bookshop, books are arranged by category. Here, books are opened by life."

A rule about not judging protects the one thing that matters: the courage to speak. When enough people speak, a book club becomes a mirror, and the mirror holds thirty-odd entirely different lives.

Last year, for the twentieth anniversary, we did something. Everyone brought a book that had mattered most to them over those twenty years, unopened, and we swapped. Whatever book you got, you read that person's life first. I drew A Rong's: an old edition of The Little Prince, with a line in her twenty-year-old handwriting on the flyleaf. "For the self who doesn't know who she is."

As we were leaving, Xiao Lin said the thing everyone still quotes: "What we have been reading in this club — it was never really the books."

Someone once asked A Rong what kept her going for twenty years. She rolled her eyes. "What kept me going is that I lost my job at forty and the people in this club dragged me out to talk about books every week. You want my reason? I'll ask you first. Is there anywhere that will listen to you talk about whatever you are reading, and not look down on you for it? If there is, you can't bear to stay away."