Listen: A 5th generation New Yorker traces her family history and finds the roots of anti-Asian violence

In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, author and CUNY professor Ava Chin, a 5th generation Chinese New Yorker, discusses her new book, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.

The book artfully explores themes of exclusion as it relates to all Chinese Americans, plus personally for Chin with her father, a “crown prince” of Chinatown that she didn’t meet until adulthood. Chin reveals personal family stories against the backdrop of the U.S. eugenics movement and draws a connecting line between the current rise in violence against Asians in North America and anti-immigration laws more than 100 years old.

Chin also showcases the resilience, love lives and dreams of Chinese immigrants as well as their resistance to the attitudes and laws of the era.

Chin On ID papers, 1914. Courtesy of Lung , Author provided (no reuse)

In our conversation, Chin said:

This story goes back to a period in time, in the era of reconstruction, when the young country was asking itself, who is an American and who is not…And the decisions that they made back then in the 19th century set us on a course as a nation towards viewing all Asians as being foreign and suspicious. And so the great aim of this book is to shed light on Asian American stories and place Asian Americans into our proper space into the larger American story.

The author’s great-grandmother Chun with daughters and grandchild, 1940s. Author provided (no reuse)

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