In ‘Mott Street,’ Ava Chin merges family and political history
Growing up in Flushing, Queens, Ava Chin knew little about the Chinese Exclusion Act. But its consequences were still palpable.
“You could feel it all around you,” Chin said. “There were secrets that were just not talked about.”
Years of research revealed that her history, and that of countless Chinese American families, was indelibly shaped by the discriminatory apparatus of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The national law and its successive iterations curbed Chinese immigration from 1882 to 1943, denying Chinese Americans the ability to naturalize and fomenting racial violence.
Chin, a fifth generation New Yorker, recounts the story of four generations of her family in her latest book, “Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.” The title of the nonfiction family saga refers to a prominent street in Manhattan’s Chinatown on which the two sides of her family collided — they were once neighbors in the same apartment building. Chin penned the majority of the book from that exact building, which she calls “a womb for my family.”
“The building is like a character, in the same way that Mott Street and Chinatown are characters in the book,” Chin said.
Chin’s lifelong curiosity about her family was driven by her father’s absence as well as the disjunction between what her maternal grandfather told her about Chinese American history and what she was taught in school. A few breakthroughs in 2015 catalyzed the research for “Mott Street,” and she began visiting archives around the US, finding genealogy documents in China, and conducting extensive family interviews to learn more about “who these people are.”
“I knew that family members were getting older and that if I didn’t do it now, I would lose some of those stories forever,” Chin said.
Since writing the book, Chin said she’s gotten more answers than the ones she originally sought.
“It feels like the inheritance of a legacy and a greater understanding of what it means to be Asian American,” Chin said.
Ava Chin will be in conversation with Celeste Ng at 7 p.m. Friday, April 28, at Harvard Book Store.