Ava Chin, MOTT STREET: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
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[1:03]Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street, a Chinese-American family's story of exclusion and
[1:09]homecoming.
[1:10]Ava is also the author of Eating Wildly, winner of the Laidam Desco Fier International
[1:15]MFK Fisher book price.
[1:17]Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times,
[1:21]The Village Voice, and Summer.
[1:23]She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library's Coleman
[1:27]Center, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Institute
[1:32]for the Humanities, and the Asian-American Writers Workshop.
[1:35]She is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the City University of New York.
[1:39]Welcome Ava.
[1:40]Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[1:42]Don't have time to read books to discuss Mott Street, a Chinese-American family's story
[1:46]of exclusion and homecoming.
[1:48]Congratulations.
[1:49]Thank you.
[1:50]It's so nice to be here with you, yeah.
[1:52]Oh, it's a nice to be here with you, too.
[1:54]We were just talking about how you were a Coleman Fellow at the New York Public Library
[1:58]and got your pitch down by repeating it at Nazism there.
[2:05]So let's hear the product of all the practice.
[2:07]What is your book about?
[2:09]Okay.
[2:10]So the short version is the Mott Street is about the impact of the Chinese exclusion
[2:15]act laws on four generations of my family.
[2:19]As we landed in the American West, then did a reverse migration across the country before
[2:24]finally landing in the same tenement apartment building and the heart of New York's
[2:29]Chinatown on Mott Street.
[2:32]It's a story about how I was trying to find out about more about my family, but then
[2:38]how I discovered so much more, unbelievable.
[2:41]Tell me about the Coleman Center.
[2:43]So was this your idea and then you went there and started digging or like give me the
[2:47]chronology of what happened here with this book?
[2:49]Sure.
[2:50]Okay.
[2:51]You know, in terms of my personal history with the book, there's a short answer and the
[2:55]long answer.
[2:56]So I mean, do we have half an hour say you just you do whatever you can do the long
[3:00]version.
[3:01]So what I'm going to tell you both, so the short version is that from 2015 a series of
[3:06]events happened that made me realize that I needed to really start to research this book.
[3:14]For me, this book was that book that you always have rattling around in the back of
[3:20]of your head, but you say to yourself, I can't do that book.
[3:24]I lack the resources, the time, the language skills, access to people, people don't want
[3:30]to talk to me.
[3:31]You know, I had all of those critics and I had saying, no, you can't do this, right?
[3:35]But then finally in 2015, all of these things conspired together and then I realized, you
[3:40]know what, people are not getting any younger, we're losing that generation in my family
[3:48]and I better start continuing to ask more questions now and do it in a formal way.
[3:54]So from that time forward, I really made this my soul project, my soul creative project.
[4:01]And I was lucky enough to land a full bright fellowship.
[4:04]I dragged my entire family, my husband and my daughter out to Shanghai.
[4:09]We did research in our villages.
[4:12]And then I landed a fellowship at the New York Public Library, Schwartzman building the
[4:16]common fellowship.
[4:18]And then for that year, I was able to use the resources at the library and have that amazing
[4:23]amount of time to really focus on working on the work.
[4:29]But the long story really is the true story, which is that I have been collecting these
[4:36]stories since I was a child.
[4:38]I grew up raised my single mother, I did not know my father, we were strange from each
[4:44]other, I didn't meet him until I was 27 years old.
[4:49]The same time, the family who raised me told me stories about the fact that I was
[4:55]the descendants of a Chinese railroad worker who helped build the nation's first transcontinental
[5:00]railroad that united the country from coast to coast after the Civil War.
[5:06]And when I went to school and my teachers started telling us about the transcontinental railroad
[5:13]and how it benefited the country, I thought I knew everything there was to know about
[5:18]the railroad.
[5:19]And then I opened up the textbook and I was like, I saw the official photograph.
[5:24]And there wasn't a single Chinese face in the photograph staring back at me.
[5:29]This was the official photograph put out by the railroad company.
[5:32]And I just thought, what is this nonsense?
[5:36]What are they trying to tell us?
[5:38]And where are we in this photo?
[5:42]From that point forward, I think that that was the moment that I realized I was a writer
[5:48]because I shared about these stories.
[5:52]And I wanted to make sure that these stories were more adequately reflected in our literature
[5:59]and our general culture.
[6:01]So really that is the real time in which I started researching the story.
[6:09]And then as I got to later on, fast forward, I'm a freelancer at the Village Voice newspaper.
[6:16]And I start researching my estranged family members.
[6:20]I discover that there's an oral history that my chin grandfather left at a local museum
[6:26]down in Chinatown.
[6:27]I don't get that oral history.
[6:31]I don't get my hands on that oral history for another 20 something years.
[6:36]So I mean, this has been a long process of putting this book together.
[6:42]And so the fact that it is finally here out into the world, it gives me so much pleasure
[6:48]that it's hard to contain myself sometimes when I'm talking about it.
[6:52]That's amazing.
[6:53]I mean, why did you not give up?
[6:55]There are so many times where you could have just been like, all right, that was fun onto the next.
[7:00]You know, I did give up for a really long time.
[7:02]It was the thing, it was a project that I always had on my back burner, right.
[7:07]I ended up doing other things that I thought were easier, like getting two masters and a PhD.
[7:15]And that's a piece of cake.
[7:17]Yeah, yeah, you procrastinate, right.
[7:20]Meeting my husband in my 30s dating in New York, right.
[7:24]Seemed way easier, giving birth to a baby without an epidural because I had the idea that I
[7:31]wanted to push her out, right.
[7:33]All of that stuff seemed so much easier than writing this gigantic book
[7:39]that I knew that I needed to do it, but I just didn't have the confidence to do it.
[7:46]And so in 2015, all of these things seem to come together that made me realize that I needed
[7:54]to write this book.
[7:55]So you want me to tell you what those things were?
[7:57]Yeah.
[7:58]Okay, I mean, I'm totally interested.
[8:00]All right, so in 2015, I went into an exhibit at the New York Historical Society.
[8:07]The exhibit was about Chinese exclusion and inclusion.
[8:12]And in that exhibit, there were all of these little clues that existed like newspapers
[8:20]and photographs that were related to my family members.
[8:25]And I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
[8:27]Chinese exclusion.
[8:28]And I thought maybe this is a frame to the story.
[8:31]Then the other thing that happened is I ended up writing about my maternal grandmother side
[8:37]of the family.
[8:38]And so they arrived here in the 1880s.
[8:41]They intermarried early.
[8:43]They had interracial marriages, right.
[8:45]There were white people who married into our family.
[8:48]But they also ended up, I didn't know this, but I was writing about my family members
[8:53]and I posted it online of this online Asian American Women's Magazine.
[8:58]And then a writer from the Ford newspaper, right, the Jewish,
[9:03]Laurie newspaper reached out to me and said, Ava, did you know that your family member
[9:10]ended up doing these big fundraisers in Chinatown, landing a hand across the
[9:16]Laurie side to is their Jewish neighbors and ended up doing these fundraisers
[9:22]for a Jewish program victims in the early part of the 20th century.
[9:27]And all of those things together made me realize that there was more there than just like collecting
[9:37]family stories and then telling them to other family members that my family was actually
[9:43]interconnected and all of these different ways in Chinatown.
[9:47]I found out once I met my father that he lived in a building on Mott Street,
[9:54]that was the same building that the maternal side of my family who raised me were also
[10:00]born and raised. Then I later found out that the families were upstairs downstairs neighbors
[10:04]from each other, kind of like the honeymooners, you know. And I realized also that not only
[10:11]were they living here as friends, neighbors, one to the same churches, summer to the same
[10:17]places in the Jersey Shore, but they were all interconnected because they lived here under
[10:23]this period in time in which the Chinese Exclusion Act was hovering above all of them.
[10:29]I think I should probably mention what the Chinese Exclusion Act is.
[10:32]No for it. This is the best interview I've ever done. I don't even have to ask you anything.
[10:36]I love it. Sorry. I'm sorry. No, I love it. Keep going. I'm just going to listen and learn.
[10:43]So the Chinese Exclusion Act was the country's first major immigration restrictions.
[10:49]It was the first time our border shut against any nationality. And what it effectively did was that
[10:56]it halted legal Chinese immigration into this country and blocked a pathway towards our
[11:02]citizenship for over 60 years. It also set the tone for future immigration and policies going forward
[11:09]so that by 1924 almost all Asians are banned from coming into the country and there were restrictions
[11:16]against southern and eastern Europeans as well. So this had major impact on immigration. I mean,
[11:24]I can even make an argument that this is one of the legislations that helped further immigration
[11:31]restrictions down the line so that even Anne Frank's family could not get into the United States,
[11:37]right? So there's a way in which so many of us are interconnected in ways that I don't think
[11:43]most Americans are aware of. So as you started discovering all these things, how did you even
[11:51]keep all this research organized, right? This is so many that I mean, did you have notebooks? Like,
[11:58]how did you keep it organized? And then how did you figure out what to include in the book?
[12:04]So I can tell you that my writing studio and my home were a big fat giant mess. Like, what you see
[12:15]behind me is wonderfully organized. But in that period when I was working on the book, it was
[12:22]just, it was bananas in here, right? There were piles everywhere. It was actually kind of impossible.
[12:30]So what I needed to do, here's the other thing. Early part of doing the research was kind of easy
[12:35]because it was like paper and I was taking notes and this was like even before I owned a computer,
[12:41]right? Because it was like when I was growing up and interviewing, you know, mock interviewing
[12:47]family members, collecting oral histories and stuff. I was so disorganized because I was,
[12:52]I was a kid or I was a college student. So I was like putting these papers and folders and
[12:58]luckily I kept a lot of my folders and I was always keeping a journal ever since I was in grade
[13:04]school. So those journals really came in handy, right? Because I also write about meeting my father
[13:11]for the first time and so I referred back to a lot of those journals. So I had all of these folders
[13:17]and all of these notebooks, you know, and my place was a mess and I had to let myself be relaxed
[13:23]about that. You know how like it's like, it was like as a woman and a mom, you always have to
[13:29]constantly deal with the tyranny of the household. I just decided I was like, you know what,
[13:35]it's either I have a clean place or, you know, I create this book for the world and I chose the world.
[13:45]So, you know, anyway, if I showed what my place really looked like on Instagram, people would be like,
[13:52]oh, you're a crazy person, right? So anyway, so I had all of those things. Then what happens later
[13:59]is we enter the era of the internet and internet research. And so a lot of my things became scans
[14:08]and then I had to figure out how to adequately put them all in the right place in my computer.
[14:14]And I felt like it was constantly losing things. Now, the only good thing about all of this
[14:19]is that it kind of allowed me to be very open to, these are things I don't talk about a lot
[14:28]because I am a professor at CUNY. But it allowed me to be open to these very interesting messages.
[14:35]I'll call them messages. Little breadcrumbs that were left that I felt like were from my ancestors
[14:42]and from the grandparents that I was estranged from and who died before I got to meet them.
[14:49]There was a way that there were these little breadcrumbs that were left behind and I was,
[14:54]I was picking them up and I feel like they led me to the story. So sometimes I would open up a
[15:00]file or I would open up my grandmother's photo albums, right? My grandmother's long since past,
[15:06]right? But I write about her in the book. I opened up her photo albums and I would find notes
[15:11]that I had taken when I was a college in the photo album or in the file. Things that I didn't
[15:19]remember that I had written but that I had done over the course of many years when they were
[15:26]so alive. So all I can say is I think young college aged Ava Chen all the time.
[15:34]This just goes to show. You never waste any time when you're interested in something. It will all
[15:39]help you in the long run. I feel like all these deep dives into things. Sometimes I stay
[15:44]up late and I'm like, I don't even know why I'm learning about this or that or whatever.
[15:48]And then somehow it like a year or two later. I'm like, oh actually I know all about that because
[15:53]I had this one random night. Do you know what I mean? Like it's never for nothing. When you feel
[15:57]that instinct to like dive deeper and deeper, it's never a waste, right? Right, right. That's right.
[16:04]So I feel like it's all interconnected. Even like you want to talk about reading, right?
[16:11]So I'm a professor of creative writing. I talked to my students about this all the time. When
[16:15]they graduate, they're like, how do I continue to have this writing life, right? You know, sometimes,
[16:21]you know, it's like it's not possible to write when you have a lot of work at your day job.
[16:28]And what I tell them is like one of the things I did when I went through like a five year period
[16:34]where I wasn't I was writing journalism but I wasn't writing long sustained narratives the way I
[16:39]wanted to. But the best thing to do in those periods are if you're reading really great literature,
[16:46]literature by people from different perspectives and you're learning about the world in a different
[16:53]way than like you had seen it before. These are things that actually change your writing voice
[17:00]and that you'll find that when you go back to the page again and start working on your work,
[17:05]that your voice has actually been strengthened by all of the reading that you've done.
[17:09]Interesting. I love it. So as a professor of creative writing, when you turn to your own work,
[17:15]how do you get through it without sort of editing yourself as you go? You know, it's really hard.
[17:21]But I think what I realized really soon into this is that a lot of the feelings that I was feeling
[17:29]when I was going through this research, right? So a lot of the research that I had to deal with
[17:34]archives I had to deal with were really thorny. They were 19th century newspapers that had a very
[17:43]popular discriminatory viewpoint that was popular for the day, right? And I had to practice reading
[17:50]against the grain when I was dealing with a lot of these archives. And what I realized is that
[17:58]all of the things that I was feeling needed to be noted down because they were important.
[18:06]And they also were a way for the reader to connect through my feelings,
[18:12]to connect to the story, you know, of these characters, these family members that
[18:18]I really cared about, right? So I think that understanding where I was in the writing process
[18:27]and the researching process was one of the key things to actually being able to write
[18:36]this epic saga of my family as they try to lay down roots in America, right? And so that was,
[18:45]like, I guess that old adage of Know Thyself really was incredibly important for me.
[18:52]Wow. And now that you've finished this colossal project that is leaking up for a lot of your adult
[18:58]lives, where do you go from here? Well, you know, a lot of it right now, you know, the book just came
[19:05]out recently and it's been getting really, really great press. So I'm very happy. So there's still
[19:12]a lot of events to do, you know, at the 92nd Street Y and the fall at the different universities.
[19:20]But when I was working on this book, this kind of weird miraculous thing happened where I felt,
[19:27]I was like in the middle of writing the book. And some point, I felt like my book gave birth to a baby.
[19:38]And I was like, oh my god, there's another 300 pages in here.
[19:43]But no, I can't do that to the reader, right? I'm already at 300 pages.
[19:51]It's time to stop. But this, so this other narrative, which is sort of more than
[20:00]narrative of the decades about the impact of exclusion
[20:05]on my parents.
[20:08]My mother was Miss Chinatown when she met my father,
[20:11]who was an aspiring politician who
[20:15]wanted to represent Chinatown and stay
[20:17]to assembly, and the kind of disaster that unfolded,
[20:21]that was their relationship and the ways in which they were
[20:24]impacted by Chinese exclusion.
[20:27]So there is that idea of that book right behind this one.
[20:32]The baby book.
[20:33]The baby book.
[20:35]But we need to talk about this book.
[20:37]I know, I know, I know.
[20:39]I know.
[20:40]You've gotten such great press and reviews everywhere.
[20:43]I'm like, how does that feel to you?
[20:46]It feels great.
[20:48]But you know, I think it feels great because it
[20:52]means that other people know about the book.
[20:55]But I think what's most important is for everybody,
[20:59]for any project that you do.
[21:01]It's most important for me how I feel about the book.
[21:05]And I love this book.
[21:08]I even loved narrating the audio book.
[21:11]Which is very interesting.
[21:12]Have you ever?
[21:13]I have.
[21:14]We're OK.
[21:15]All right.
[21:16]Narrated for audio books.
[21:18]So you know.
[21:19]It is like, it's a marathon.
[21:23]I mean, I likened it after the first day or two.
[21:27]I likened it to giving birth without an epidural
[21:32]as being easier than narrating the audio book, right?
[21:36]And because at least it's after you give birth,
[21:38]it's like you have a baby, right?
[21:40]With this, it's like, it's like days and days and days.
[21:45]I had to do it for five days because, you know,
[21:47]the book is kind of extensive.
[21:49]And you know, but by the end of it,
[21:53]I actually had a different relationship with my voice.
[21:58]You know, I was the kind of person.
[22:00]I think like most people, they're like, oh,
[22:03]I don't like the sound of my voice.
[22:05]And I don't like it when they play it back.
[22:06]You know, you get very self-conscious.
[22:09]But after the first day or two, after listening to it,
[22:12]I was like, no, actually, I appreciate my voice.
[22:17]And so it gave me a better connection with myself
[22:20]and also with the book itself.
[22:22]Because, you know how it's like,
[22:24]you're working on it for a long time and it gets edited.
[22:27]You don't actually, as the writer,
[22:29]really read the entire book through
[22:32]to the system start to finish, right?
[22:35]Because you're just like, edit it.
[22:36]You're dealing with different sections of the book.
[22:38]So it's a big snareating the audio book.
[22:41]I was like, oh, I'm on this journey to like the reader.
[22:45]So I really love my audio book.
[22:46]I highly recommend it.
[22:48]Okay, all right, noted.
[22:50]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[22:54]I think that particularly for writers
[22:58]who are working in family stories,
[23:02]the most important thing is to start doing those interviews now.
[23:09]Because people aren't, are not around forever.
[23:13]You don't wanna be in a position where you're like,
[23:15]what did I ask, Ramha, that question.
[23:18]She always told me that story,
[23:20]but I never really noted it down.
[23:22]Now I have other questions about it.
[23:25]So I think that the sooner that you start, the better.
[23:29]The other thing I would say,
[23:30]and this goes back to your question about,
[23:33]how do you get out of your own way?
[23:35]Or how do you stop those critics that are in your head?
[23:40]I think that the one thing that,
[23:43]like the one thing that I always remember being nervous about,
[23:47]and it's the number one thing that a lot of my students
[23:49]are worried about when the writing memoirs about their families
[23:53]are the word, well, what is my family gonna say, right?
[23:56]When this comes out.
[23:58]And I think the important thing is to remember that right now
[24:02]when you're writing, that's the time
[24:04]in which you've got to collect everything
[24:07]and you have to write it down.
[24:09]You're not showing this to anybody.
[24:11]I always recommend not showing the working manuscript
[24:15]to any family members or any important people
[24:18]that you write about until the point in time
[24:21]in which you land a contract
[24:23]and you know that the book is coming out.
[24:25]That's different than you start talking about people
[24:27]because you know, you have relationships with them.
[24:29]But then the beginning when you're working on the work,
[24:32]your job as the writer is to protect the writing, right?
[24:36]Create the best environment for the writing,
[24:40]for your flow possible.
[24:42]Like that is your sole job.
[24:43]Not to take care of family members
[24:46]and their feelings, you know, it's very real.
[24:49]I'm a daughter, I was a granddaughter, you know,
[24:52]I know all of those feelings.
[24:54]I was raised in a family that was like,
[24:55]do not air the dirty laundry, right?
[24:58]So sorry grandma, I did.
[25:02]The other thing, the other tip I would say
[25:04]is that what was really important for me
[25:07]when I was talking to family members
[25:11]who did not wanna talk to me, right?
[25:13]My father was very reticent about talking about a lot of this
[25:18]was that I was very clear with myself and then with him
[25:24]that the story was much larger than him or I.
[25:29]The story, you know, was much larger
[25:32]than any individual family member.
[25:34]The story touches upon things that happens
[25:38]in our nation's, you know, national past
[25:44]and affects us today.
[25:46]So I think when my father realized that,
[25:51]you know, it was a little bit easier for him to talk.
[25:54]So that was incredibly helpful.
[25:57]Awesome, Eva, thank you so much.
[26:00]This is so interesting.
[26:02]So exciting about your book, congratulations
[26:04]on this massive accomplishment.
[26:07]And yeah, I can't wait to watch you just, you know, soar.
[26:11]Thanks so much, Zivi.
[26:12]Thanks for having me on your podcast.
[26:14]No, thanks for leaving the way.
[26:15]This was like the greatest half an hour of my life.
[26:18]Thank you.
[26:19]Thank you.
[26:21]Okay, take care.
[26:23]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[26:26]to Read Books.
[26:27]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zivi Owens
[26:30]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:32]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zivi Owens.com
[26:34]and sign up for my virtual book club
[26:36]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:39]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[26:40]at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:43]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[26:44]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.