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Alison Stewart: All right, this is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you've been to Manhattan's Chinatown, you've probably walked down Mott Street. It's at the heart of the neighborhood. Mott Street is where writer Ava Chin's ancestors lived, established businesses, and raised families for generations. It's also in the title of her new memoir, which explores the rich history of the Chinese diaspora in the United States through her own family's story.

She traces her lineage to mid-1800s when her ancestors emigrated from the Pearl River Delta to the turn of the 20th century when her great-great-grandparents helped build America's first transcontinental railroad. She also takes us through New York in the mid-1990s and the stories of her grandfather's family who lived and worked on Mott Street. Through extensive archival research, oral histories, and personal essays, Mott Street is Chin's quest to unearth what she calls "the long-buried bones of her family's history."

Now, the research process was challenging. Her family records are full of gaps and errors frankly she attributes to the Chinese Exclusion Act, America's first significant law restricting immigration to the US. The law barred immigration from China and prevented Chinese people from obtaining American citizenship for more than six decades. The New York Times called the book sensitive, ambitious, and well-reported. Joining me now in the studio to discuss Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming is Ava Chin. Ava, welcome to the studio.

Ava Chin: Oh, it is such a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: What was going on with you on the day you decided to really do this project?

Ava Chin: Just going back a little bit, I was raised by a single mother. I did not know my father's side of the family. I didn't meet him until I was in my 20s. Growing up, I heard all of these stories about them. They were only ever spoken about in whispers. They were supposedly bigwigs in Chinatown. Who even knew what that meant, right? At the same time, my mother's side of the family, the side that raised me, told me all of these stories about the fact that we were descendants from Chinese railroad workers.

A railroad worker who had worked on the nation's first transcontinental railroad that, at least, physically united the country after the Civil War. One of the things I think that made me a writer was by the time I was in grade school and I opened up the big textbook in American history about the completion of the railroad, the official photograph didn't have a single Chinese face in it.

I thought, "What is this nonsense? What are they trying to tell us?" I think from that moment forward, I was on this journey to try to understand more about our stories and our history, particularly as it related to something larger that was happening in the country. What I uncovered after meeting my father for the first time in Chinatown was actually the bones of something much larger.

Alison Stewart: You go into detail about the first time you saw his face.

Ava Chin: Yes, it was weird. It was one of those things growing up. I had always been told that I looked just like him, that I sounded like him. I did not realize exactly how true that was until I finally met him. We even walked the same way. It's kind of eerie.

Alison Stewart: As you started the project and you started to interview family members and various relatives, how open were they to talking about their history?

Ava Chin: It all depended on who it was and what was happening at the time. Sometimes my grandmother who raised me was happy to talk about her family, but other times, she did not. I was raised by a family that did not believe in airing the dirty laundry, but what I had to do was to talk to people about the fact that the story was much larger than just myself and my father, that this was a story about what happened to a significant amount of the population, the Chinese-American population, in this country going back to the 19th century, and that these stories were important and they needed to be told.

Alison Stewart: What history did you know about Mott Street's history before you started the project?

Ava Chin: All I knew at the time was that I knew that both sides of my family had long-standing roots in Chinatown. I knew that the Chin side of my family had underworld connections during a period in time in which Chinese people were heavily discriminated against, so they needed to stay within the community. They engaged in vices and they have their fingers in different pies getting kickbacks, which I go into in the book.

I didn't realize just how interconnected both sides of my family was until I started asking questions. Then I realized that both sides of my family lived in the exact same tenement apartment building in the heart of the community on Mott Street as upstairs-downstairs neighbors from each other sending their kids to the same schools, the same churches. They even, at a certain point in time, summered together in the same neighborhoods on the Jersey Shore. These were things that totally blew my mind.

Alison Stewart: I bet.

Ava Chin: The other thing that I realized is that they all had to deal with the same discriminatory legislation that hovered over everybody for that 61-year period.

Alison Stewart: Yes, let's get into that. First of all, my guess is Ava Chin. The name of the book is Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Belonging. Can you set the stage about the Chinese Exclusion Act, when it started, why it started, and then when you started digging into it, its direct impact on you?

Ava Chin: Yes, it's a great question. The Chinese Exclusion Act goes back to a period in time during the era of Reconstruction. Really, its roots are in the era of Reconstruction, right? This is after the railroad is completed. There are tens of thousands of Chinese men who have worked on the railroad and they start working in other manufacturing jobs, right? This is out west. Then what happens after the railroad is completed is a great economic depression.

They called it the Great Depression at the time until our Great Depression of the 20th century. When that was enacted, all of a sudden, I think some of the ugliest parts of human sentiment came out. You had mostly immigrants from Europe, on the East Coast, and white folks from the East Coast jump on that same railroad that my ancestor helped build. They go, they wind up in the West, and they see Chinese people in manufacturing jobs that they think should be theirs.

This anti-Chinese sentiment at the time was incredibly popular, so much so to the point that politicians jump on the bandwagon. Politicians on the West Coast then strike deals with Southern politicians who are intent upon maintaining supremacy. What they do is they work hand in hand to enact the first immigration restrictions and it's against Chinese. What that means then is that all Chinese become suspicious automatically.

They are subject to these incredible immigration restrictions where they're not allowed to come in legally. They also are not allowed to become citizens. They're not allowed to naturalize, so they can't vote out these laws. When I really started to dig in and look at this history, it really broke my heart because one of the things that I always learned about in my family was the great contributions that we made to the railroad.

By the way, the infrastructure for a lot of that railroad is still around today out west. My family and I went out and saw the Summit Tunnels, where my ancestors blasted through the Sierra Nevada in some of the worst winters in history, right? By the way, there's a same area of the country where the Donner Party was stuck 20 years ago like stopped in its tracks, right? What's so difficult about this history for me is that it's not just a distanced history.

For me, it's really personal because my family members were here at the time. One of the things that I discovered was that people were pushed out of their homes. There were white riots against Chinese people. At a certain point when my family members were living out west, over 200 towns in California pushed out their Chinese residents. This is something that we don't really talk a lot about even within the community. My family members would talk about the troubles out west, right?

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Ava Chin: They really often did not use the term "Chinese exclusion," but it was the elephant that was in the room. Because what ended up happening is because the restrictions were so tight in order for people to get into the country, they had to come over under the cover of night under false identities.

Alison Stewart: Which means names don't match families.

Ava Chin: That's right so that you'll have two names, right? Sometimes when I was interviewing folks, they would say, "Oh, well, do you want my real name or do you want the paper name?" because the family name is different, right? This was not uncommon and it was often not spoken about because Chinese exclusion had real implications for people. If you told your children about this, the kids could say something to the authorities, and then you could get Dad or Grandpa deported, right? Within that period in time, it was very, very difficult to be Chinese.

Alison Stewart: As you start to talk to your family and you start learning more of the truth and start piecing it together because, as you mentioned, sometimes the names didn't match, sometimes there were huge gaps in the family history, how did you prepare yourself for the truths you might hear? Sometimes when people go digging, they find things that they weren't anticipating.

Ava Chin: Yes, so I am one of those people that is naturally curious and I don't shy away from the difficult things. I understand that certain things are really uncomfortable for folks to talk about. A lot of these secrets were really long buried. I'm sure my grandmother, who has long since passed away, is probably feeling a little uncomfortable in her grave.

Sorry, Grandma, but the truth needed to come out. I think also, the fact that I grew up not knowing my father and I didn't meet him until I was in my 20s. I think I'm used to feeling a little bit like both an insider as well as an outsider within my own family as well as, to a certain extent, the community because so many people in the community know both sides of my family.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ava Chin. The name of the book is Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming. There are so many different names and characters and themes because the story is very rich. Writing question, how did you keep track of it all? No, I didn't? [laughs]

Ava Chin: Even I have several family trees up in my writing studio so I can refer back to the time period and when they were here because people were constantly coming and going. There were so many characters, so many generations, so many couples. Oh, that's actually one of the things that when I was-- An organizing principle of the book is not just the immigration laws, but it's also-- I thread the stories together through these various couples.

My great grandparents, grandparents, when they came over, how they were able to come over, how they were able to live together. They didn't always love each other when they were living in the building. They were upstairs-downstairs neighbors from each other. There's that moment where it's like, "Why is that person upstairs so loud? Why don't they control their own kids?" It was important though to get at all of the nuances. They were real people.

Alison Stewart: You teach creative nonfiction writing at CUNY. What is something that you as a writer found challenging that maybe you as a teacher had assigned a student or something you've told your students to do that now you had to do it?

Ava Chin: That's a good question. I'm always telling my students like, "Get out of the classroom. Go out into the world. Report about a subculture, a subculture that you have access to." What I realized is that I was the person to write this book because of where my family sits, having such long-standing roots in New York. I'm a fifth-generation New Yorker. We've been in New York since the 1880s. What's great is to go into the community. I don't have to go to China. I don't leave the country in order to be connected with my roots.

I just have to take a train down to Chinatown and I'm there. Anyway, it was not that easy because even though I'm kind of an insider because of my family has been here for so long, I suffer from being an American-born Chinese, a Jook-sing, meaning I lack certain language skills. I'll be honest. I am illiterate mostly, except for a few characters that have to do with food, right? I came with certain challenges. What I tell my students is that if I overcame these challenges, if I could go back to China and do reporting there, you can do it too.

Alison Stewart: What would you like people to think about the next time they're walking down Mott Street?

Ava Chin: I think I would like people to think about the ways in which the Chinese community has been here for a very long time since the 1870s. I would also like for folks to understand the ways in which Chinatown is not just a place that people came together because of common-language ties and food ties and cultural ties. It was a place of refuge for folks when they were fleeing the anti-Chinese pogroms out west. That really is how Chinatown formed. Yes, it's a place of resilience, but it is a place of refuge.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming. It is by Ava Chin. Ava, thank you for coming to the studio today.

Ava Chin: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.

Alison Stewart: Fifth-generation New Yorker, that's cred. [laughs] There is more All Of It on the way. Fabric artist Bisa Butler joins us next. She's a local New Jersey artist whose work is currently on display at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in SoHo. She creates elaborate quilted portraits inspired by images from legendary photographers like Gordon Parks. We'll talk to Bisa Butler right after the news.

 

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