Mott Street: A Virtual Book Talk + Q&A with Ava Chin

Join OCA National and OCA-New York for this special APA Heritage Month virtual conversation with Ava Chin—author, performer, and professor—as she talks about her new memoir Mott Street, about the impact of the country’s first immigration restrictions, the Chinese Exclusion Act, on four generations of her family in NYC’s Chinatown.

Publisher’s Weekly called Mott Street “stunning” and The New York Times described it as “sensitive, ambitious, well-reported.” Chin will be in conversation with OCA-New York’s Interim Co-President, Darci Wen Siegel. Two lucky attendees will receive a free copy of the book!

Register here.

About the Book

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 Streettraces 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.

Mott Street will be released April 23, 2024. You can pre-order the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, Powell’s, Target, and Walmart.

About the Author

Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street, a 2024 ALA Notable Book and a Best Book of 2023 by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, and Elle, and the award-winning Eating Wildly. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times(“Urban Forager”), Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, SPINand VIBE, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from the NYPL’s Cullman Center, the Fulbright U.S. Scholar’s Program, NYFA, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She is Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the City University of New York, and the head of American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. The Huffington Post called her one of “Nine Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading.”

Learn More about Ava at avachin.com.