Mott Street by Ava Chin (Penguin Press)

When Ava Chin first saw a picture of the completed transcontinental railroad, she was puzzled to see no Chinese faces in the photograph. From the time she was very small, her grandfather had told her stories about his grandfather. Yuan Son came to America in the 1860s when he was still in his teens and was immediately hired as one of the many Chinese men who laid track for the railroad that would unite the country. He and his crew had won a bet for their employers by accomplishing the impossible task of putting down ten miles of railroad track in a single day. Why weren’t the Chinese laborers mentioned in her history book?

What she didn’t know was the continuing story of her great-great-grandfather who took his earnings after the railroad construction was over and moved to Idaho, a place that in 1870 had a population that was 30% Chinese. He opened two businesses and was a solid part of his community until economic turmoil struck and the Chinese Americans became a convenient scapegoat. After thirty years in the U.S. Yuan Son was chased out of his home by his white neighbors as they yelled “The Chinese must go!” He returned to his ancestral village where he was understandably reluctant to have his sons and grandsons retrace his journey to seek their fortune in the U.S.

This wasn’t the only piece of family history that Ava learned about as she was growing up. Although she often went to Manhattan’s Chinatown, she had no idea that the father she had never known lived around the corner from the building where her mother had grown up, 37 Mott Street. Nor did she know that both sides of her family, paternal and maternal, had lived for over a hundred years as neighbors in that same building. 

Long before Ava finally met her father, she learned about the tangled history of the Chins and the Wongs. It came to her in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her grandparents’ stories about the Wong and Doshim families and through snatches of historical research about her paternal clan, the Chins. When she was in her twenties, she finally found her father, a prominent Chinatown resident who lived in the only remaining Manhattan townhouse that dated back to the days of the American Revolution, on Pell Street, only two blocks from 37 Mott Street. It was a place Ava had walked past countless times, never knowing that this place contained the hidden part of her family.

At this point, uncovering the history of the Chins , the Doshims, and the Wongs became Ava’s life’s work. Her academic training gave her the ability to do piercing and unflagging research, eventually sending her to live in China as a Fulbright scholar. However it was the torrents of memory, the oral stories, not written records, that held “the keys to truth” and revealed “the rich, loamy terroir” of both her family history and the history they inhabited on two continents.

The child of a doomed relationship between a beauty who had been Miss Chinatown and a dashing young playboy who drove a Triumph convertible, Ava’s lineage went back to the beginnings of New York’s Chinatown and continued throughout the terrible bastion of racism that was fostered by the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1882 until 1943, her ancestors’ lives were battered and truncated by this legislation, denying them all citizenship in a country they made their home for five generations. It was only the fifth, Ava’s generation, that would have the full privileges of an American birthright from the moment they opened their American eyes.

As her ancestors worked and prospered, they did all they possibly could to prove themselves more than worthy of citizenship. During each of the world wars, Dek Foon, an uncle to Ava’s maternal grandmother and a Chinatown powerbroker and philanthropist, was at his local draft board as soon as his age group was eligible to sign up, although as a man in his late forties and then in his sixties, he wasn’t called for duty. He and his colleagues were indefatigable fundraisers for Russian Jews who suffered pogroms in !903, an act of kindness with political benefits as New York Jews took note. 

Foon’s wife, Elva May Lisk, became a pillar of strength and kindness to her husband’s family. Their marriage was a love match that was able to come into being because New York had no anti-miscegenation laws and it lasted until Dek Foon’s death. One of the most moving portions of the family history takes place when Ava discovers that Elva hadn’t been buried next to her husband. Stealthily she scoops earth from each of their burial sites, placing a portion of one spouse’s earth on the other’s grave, uniting them in the only way she can. 

The Doshims and the Wongs were people who married for love. The Chins were pragmatic Don Juans whose passion for gambling and fast living eclipsed anything they might have felt for the women in their lives. Ava’s grandmother Rose, the smartest woman in Chinatown, a graduate of Hunter College in a time when this was an anomaly and a stunning accomplishment for a Chinese American woman, told her granddaughter scathing stories about the Chins, who made and lost fortunes and squandered their expensive educations.

Through the pages of Mott Street is an overlay to this well-told family history. It’s the shameful history of the United States that Ava uncovers in a state of rage and grief, facts that live in a ghostly state of forgotten truths and are now brought to light. From Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay to the immigration hell that once thrived in the small New York town of Malone, there was no recognition of the propaganda written by Emma Lazurus. No Lady Liberty was there to “lift my  lamp above the golden door.” Even for Chinese residents who had the 19th Century equivalent of a “green card,” travel outside of the U.S. was a risky business that might ensure they could never return.

This shadowed history is beautifully and scaldingly interlaced with the stories of Ava’s families, making Mott Street a book that should be required reading for every high school civics class.~Janet Brown