Ava Chin at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes AVA CHIN—author and winner of the Les Dames d’Escoffier International M.F.K. Fisher Book Prize—for a discussion of her forthcoming memoir Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming. She will be joined in conversation by CELESTE NG—bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts.

A Return to In-Person Events

Harvard Book Store is excited to be back to in-person programming. To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone in attendance, the following Covid-19 safety protocols will be in place at all of our Harvard Book Store events until further notice:

• Face coverings are required of all staff and attendees when inside the store. Masks must snugly cover nose and mouth.

About Mott Street

As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.

Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.

In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities. She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

Gorgeously written, deeply researched, and tremendously resonant, Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.

Praise for Mott Street

“Ava Chin has created a stunning work of genealogy that traces her family’s legacy in America back from present day Mott Street in New York City to the early days of Chinese Exclusion in California. It is a tender and loving portrait of her ancestors, depicting their joys and struggles as they built both the nation’s infrastructure and spaces of resistance and belonging for those excluded from the nation. More than a family history, Mott Street is a history of a people's survival and a history of America.​” —Grace M. Cho, author Tastes Like War

“Ava Chin has taken the stories she was told and the hurts that came her way in childhood and transformed them into an historically researched portrayal of two families in a new country that wanted their labor but not their citizenship. Chin reveals the pain that overcomes her as she learns her past but she proceeds by drawing strength from feeling her ancestors all around her in their building in Manhattan's Mott Street. The essence of this story is a yearning to understand the past and to discover what Chin can make of her glorious yet underusing inheritance in her present life as an author, professor, and parent. Mott Street is a masterpiece that opens up a unique history into a consideration of what came before that offers inspiration for all readers.” —Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

“Sweeping yet intimate, Mott Street is a lyrical, gripping account of survival, resilience and resistance. Through tireless research, Ava Chin uncovers the stories of her family that might have been lost to history. Deeply moving and unforgettable.” —Vanessa Hua, Forbidden City