Professor Ava Chin describes the making of her acclaimed memoir “Mott Street,” why personal stories are political acts, and why you should call your grandmother right now.
There is a particular kind of urgency in the way that Ava Chin talks about family stories. As if time is running out and most of us don’t yet know it.
“Do not wait,” she said. “Pick up the phone, call the oldest member of your family right now, start asking those questions now because people are not going to be around forever and you’re not going to want to later regret that you did not ask those questions.”
Chin is a professor at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches in the Biography and Memoir master’s program and leads the American Studies certificate program. She is one of the most compelling voices working at the intersection of family history, immigration, and American identity. Her acclaimed memoir, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming — named a TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2023, an ALA Notable Book, and winner of the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Non-Fiction Book Prize — traces four generations of her family through New York’s Chinatown and into the long shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law in U.S. history to restrict immigration based on race and nationality.
Her book began with a mystery hiding in plain sight.
“The mail would come to our house to my grandfather under a different name,” Chin said. “And when I asked my grandmother, ‘Who is that person?’ She said, ‘Oh, that’s grandpa’s paper name.'” Chin was bewildered as, to her knowledge, none of her friends’ relatives received mail under false identities. “Is my grandfather here under a false alias? Is he illegal?” she wondered. Then came the contradiction that would haunt her for decades: “How could my grandfather be illegal if his grandfather helped create this apparatus that was so important to the country in the 19th century?”
That apparatus was the first transcontinental railroad — the vast engineering project that physically united the United States after the Civil War, built in significant part by Chinese laborers whose contributions were systematically erased. “When I saw not a single Chinese face staring back at me,” she said of the official railroad company photograph marking its completion, “I knew that there was something wrong, and I knew that there were important stories that needed to be told.”
Understanding those stories meant grappling with the Chinese Exclusion Act — legislation that Chin frames not as an isolated moment of prejudice, but as a structural turning point in American history. The laws, which effectively shut the border against Chinese immigrants from 1882 to 1943, also blocked pathways to their citizenship, despite their contributions to and presence in the country for generations. But the reach of these laws extended further than most people realize, Chin says.
“When Chinese exclusion was ratified into law, this is the era of Reconstruction,” Chin explained. “This was a period in time in which the country was asking itself who is an American and who is not.” However, deep entrenchment ensued, shaped by political calculation from multiple directions: “West Coast politicians who were intent upon keeping Asians out worked hand in hand with Southern politicians who were intent upon maintaining supremacy.” The consequences cascaded. “Slavery becomes Jim Crow and segregation. And by 1917 and 1924, we had immigration policies that tried to stop the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe as well. So it wasn’t just Chinese Americans that were impacted by these laws, but the impact on the Asian American community cannot be overstated.”
Chin began pursuing these threads seriously around 2015, after a visit to an exhibition at The New-York Historical Society (now The New York Historical) where she came face to face with documents and photographs of her own family — her great-grandfather’s identification papers among them.
Inspired by the writings of novelist Maxine Hong Kingston as an undergraduate student at CUNY Queens College, Chin felt the call to dig deeper and began interviewing family members at every opportunity. She went on to receive a Fulbright fellowship, traveled to China, visited ancestral villages, collected genealogy documents held by village elders, and conducted archival research at National Archive offices across the country.
Eventually she discovered something that moved her deeply: A grandfather she had never met had left behind archives and an oral history at what is now the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan. “He also wanted these stories to be told, so that future family members like myself could discover them,” she said. “He also wanted community members to also see their stories reflected because [they] told a much larger story about what happened to the Chinese diaspora in America and illuminated a part of American history that was hidden in plain sight — and that’s a true gift. I am enormously grateful for my grandfather for leaving those stories.”
The book that emerged is as much an argument about the power of memoir as it is a family saga. Chin believes personal narrative does something that policy papers and political speeches cannot; it closes the distance between history and the people living inside it.
“People think that they know everything that they need to know about race, inequality, immigration,” she said, “but there’s something about a true story about people who are not famous, people who are not rich, and the ways in which these larger issues impact real people’s lives, that are a lot easier to connect with.”
That capacity for connection is especially striking, Chin suggests, because the story of Chinese exclusion is also a story about New York — a city whose multicultural texture has long been both its promise and its challenge. Her research revealed ancestors who forged bonds with Jewish neighbors on the Lower East Side, Irish pastors from Brooklyn, and Black ministers in Harlem. “New York has always been this kind of multicultural place where there were opportunities but there were also big roadblocks,” she said. “When you read these stories, you realize that there are lines of commonality amongst all of us, even as there were beautiful, specific differences between us too. A memoir can really encompass all of it.”
At a moment when immigration has once again become a flashpoint in American politics, Chin sees the lessons of that history as both urgent and largely unlearned. “The issue of immigration is always going to be a hot button issue because people have a knee jerk reaction to who we consider not one of us,” she said. “And until we reckon with this, I think as a country, we, Americans, are always going to be susceptible to politicians who want to ride anti-immigrant sentiment straight into office.”
For Chin, the antidote is story, and the starting place is closer than most people think — their oldest living family members.
“Start asking those questions now,” she said.
(By CUNY Graduate Center)