FR: Ava Chin, welcome to Writers' Voice.
AC: Oh, it's so good to be here with you.
I love this book, Mott Street, A Chinese-American Family's History of Exclusion and Homecoming. I want to say right up at the front that it was an absolutely terrific read. It read like a novel.
Maybe we'll get a chance to talk a little bit about how you were able to reconstruct what happened, the whole history of your family over a period of time, but before we do that, I actually want to ask you about the subtitle, A Chinese-American Family's History of Exclusion and Homecoming. Those are two almost opposite concepts. The exclusion refers not just to a general phenomenon, but to the specific law, the Chinese Exclusion Act. And it provides a framework for the book. Tell us a little bit about your own personal relationship to that act, your thinking about it, how that motivated you to do this book.
Yeah, the subtitle is A Chinese-American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming. And exclusion was the frame for the book.
When I set about working on this book, I was really thinking that I was trying to uncover our family's story. So just a little bit of background, I was raised by a single mother and loving Chinese-American grandparents. But I was estranged from an entire side of my family. My parents' divorce was so acrimonious that I never saw them together in the same room. And so I didn't know my father growing up as a child. I didn't meet him until I was in my 20s.
And by that point, I also knew that the family that raised me, from the family that raised me, that I was a descendant of a Chinese railroad worker who had helped build the nation's first transcontinental railroad, which was the apparatus that at least physically united the country after the Civil War.
And what I realized growing up is that these stories that I heard about the railroad and our contributions to it weren't being taught in schools. In fact, when I was in grade school and I learned about the transcontinental railroad, I was shocked to see the official photograph of the completion of the railroad. And there wasn't a single Chinese or Asian face in the photograph.
And I knew that there was something wrong. I knew that there was this hole, that something was missing. But I didn't discover the idea of or the actual laws of Chinese exclusion until much later, until I was in college. And I learned about it in literature.
But it was sort of the elephant that was in the room in terms of when folks got together, family members got together. And when we met other Chinese people who had as long roots in America as we did, I found out that my family members all lived during this 61-year period where Chinese people were not allowed to come in legally into the country, and they were prevented from becoming citizens for over 60 years.
And so the idea of exclusion all of a sudden started to really loom large with me when I realized that both sides of my family were living in New York during much of that time period. That the reason why they were in New York in the first place was because the discriminatory anti-Chinese sentiment that was really popular, enormously popular at the time, and had helped to create Chinese exclusion in the first place, had fomented into these anti-Chinese pogroms or these pushing out of Chinese people from the West Coast and from Idaho.
And so a lot of people, this is the 19th century, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, folks had to make a decision since they were pushed out of the places out West that they were living, they had to make a decision about where they were going to live.
And my family members, most of them ended up jumping on the same train that my forebears helped to create and rode that train out further East to New York where they wound up living in the same neighborhood, in the same tenement apartment building, in the heart of the community on Mott Street.
And where you live today, is that right?
I do not live on Mott Street, but I'm lucky enough that I have a writing studio there. And it's a wonderful place because it's where so many generations of both sides of my family were born and raised.
And so your family was excluded by the Chinese Exclusion Act, and you were excluded by half of your family, your father's half of the family. Now let's talk about homecoming. What is the meaning of that in the title of this book, Mott Street?
I think that the homecoming is multifaceted. The homecoming is the discovery of this place, this particular building in New York's Chinatown, where both sides of my family lived as upstairs, downstairs neighbors from each other, decades and generations before I was born.
The homecoming is, I think, a sense of that embrace of home that a neighborhood and a community can really give to you.
I think for so long, I felt very excluded from my family because I did not know an entire side of my family.
But to realize that, in fact, both sides of my family had known each other for generations as upstairs, downstairs neighbors from each other, as members of the same Boy Scout troops, as members of the same churches and schools, as neighbors both in Chinatown, as well as there was a certain point in time in which they summered together out on the Jersey Shore. And they became neighbors once they became homeowners and bought up houses out there, too.
So the sense of homecoming, for me, is really tangible as it relates to this building and this community that was a refuge for us all during this very, very difficult period in American history.
One of the wonderful things about being connected in this way and being able to trace my roots back to this building is that the building has really felt like a refuge for the entire family. This was the place where they could feel at home. And the fact that I have a connection to the building, it just means the world to me.
And I can bring that story and teach these lessons of this legacy of resilience as my family members both tried to fight the Chinese Exclusion Act laws and they coalition-build with other communities in the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century.
That was astounding to me, the fact that they were so disenfranchised here, but they still reached out to other communities. They still helped other communities when other communities became refugees in other parts of the world.
Yeah, in fact, this was something I didn't know. You write about 1903, which is when my family, Russian Jews, came over from the Russian-Polish border because of the pogroms, came to the Lower East Side of New York, not far from where your family came. And the Chinese citizens, your family, in fact, mobilized support for the Jews who were fleeing persecution in Russia. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Yeah, so that to me was totally fascinating.
So you're right, the time period was 1903. And in this period, it was the first pogroms of the 20th century. It was the Kishinev pogroms. It was often called “the shot that was heard around the world.”
And folks really mobilized. Fundraisers were done throughout the Jewish communities, the diaspora, certainly throughout the United States. And the call went out. It was in the newspapers. The call went out here in New York that money needed to be raised to help these refugees.
And it was an interesting period in time for Chinatown because it was the same period. It was a year after Chinese exclusion was made permanent. And so all the organizing work that my family members had done to try to fight exclusion landed for them in naught, in the sense that they were not able to prevent the continuation of Chinese exclusion. But they continued to fight for our civil rights.
And they were deeply interested in helping out other people. And I think the fact that Chinatown is part of the Lower East Side, and the fact that a lot of their neighbors were Jewish, and they had been already building bridges with their neighbors in the Jewish Lower East Side, and also courting different politicians at the time period.
New York City politicians, Tammany Hall was the dominant force in New York City at the time. And there were Jewish politicians as well. The Jewish politicians were some of the first–and the few–to speak out against Chinese exclusion, I think because there was probably a feeling and an understanding that if exclusion could happen to Chinese people, the next step might be to Jewish people as well. So I think it was in folks' best interests to work together.
And other writers, writers from the Forward newspaper have written about this. But I think it was actually, it goes much deeper than that. Because my great uncle and others like him had survived this great pushing out, these pogroms against Chinese out West.
Once he made it to New York, and was able to establish himself as a merchant, and was able to be, he couldn't become a citizen, but he was able to become prosperous. He wanted to help out other people as well.
And I think the great takeaway was not just in what my family members were able to do to help Jewish refugees in the time period. It was also significant in the fact, it was newsworthy. So there were headlines in English language press. And the headlines were things like, “Chinese help Jews,” or “Chinese go out for Jews.” And it was newsworthy and noteworthy for a lot of English language readers.
Because what happened was, they were so shocked by this that a lot of Christians around the country decided, well, if Chinese people were helping Jewish people, well, we really need to be doing that too. And so heads of certain very large Jewish congregations mentioned this. They're like, yeah, because of these fundraisers, now Christians across the country have been sending donations to us as well. So this was nothing short, I think, of astounding even for me to uncover.
Yeah, it's just a great story. And you've already mentioned, I mean, this book is filled with the most memorable characters. You've already mentioned one, Dek Foon. I mean, both sides of your family were larger than life. But tell us a little bit about Dek Foon and also his wife, Elva Lisk. I mean, what a remarkable story.
Yes, yes. So when Dek Foon comes into the country, it's a couple of years after the establishment of exclusion. And he comes because, China at the time in the 19th century had suffered through the opium wars with the West, great famine, a revolutionary war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. And so Dek Foon and other men like him came out when they were in their 20s. They came to America because they needed to provide money for their families.
And unfortunately, the American laws also made it really difficult for Asian women to come over.
So Dek Foon could not bring his wife and his son. So he was forced to be separated from them.
The wife passes away when the son is in grade school and Dek Foon makes a decision that it's better for the son to stay in China and to get a good private school education than to come here in America, where sometimes this is not the case in New York, but in other parts of the country, sometimes the Chinese children were not able to go to school with the other children, right? Because of segregation. So he decided that it was better that his son stay in China and get a good education there.
And he continued to work. So because of exclusion, by the way, he does not get to meet his son again, who he left when he was a toddler, until the son was in his twenties. So in this period, Dek Foon is living in New York. He is part of a very progressive Chinese Christian community in New York City.
And he meets Elva Lisk, who was born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a civil war veteran. And Elva, Aunt Elva is harboring a secret that we won't talk about that here, right? That will be something that the readers can read about. But Aunt Elva's secret actually in effect destroys her first marriage.
And so by the time Aunt Elva and Uncle Dek Foon meet, they are both older, they are mature individuals, and they have both suffered from the loss of a partner in some way, shape or form.
Their love story is one of the most interesting central moments in the book. They are central characters in the book. They were so important to my grandmother's family, my maternal grandmother's family. It was such a pleasure to learn about them and to write about them.
The interesting, I think one of the interesting things for many readers, first of all, Francesca, as you know, because you read the book, there are so many characters, so many decades, so many generations that I deal with, but there's so much interesting hidden knowledge and history that I think a lot of Americans just don't know about.
And so I think one of the really interesting things about Aunt Elva is that Aunt Elva lived in a period in time in which, by the way, it was very common for American families to disown their daughters if they married or had relationships outside of their race, right?
But her family did not disown her. While they didn't necessarily embrace Uncle Dec, because I think it was difficult for them, right, during this time period, they certainly gave their blessings to the marriage.
But she was abandoned by her country.
Right, so I'm about to get to that. So unfortunately for Aunt Elva, a couple of years after they got married, the government decided that a woman's, an American woman's citizenship needed to change to reflect that of her husband's.
And so what that meant is that some women, if a woman married an English man or an American woman married a German, she became, in the eyes of the American law, an English woman or a German woman.
And in the case of Aunt Elva and the other white women who married into these interracial marriages, Aunt Elva became, in the eyes of the law, a Chinese.
She would not have realized that this happened. Most American women did not realize they had lost their citizenship until many years later when women finally got the right to vote and women registered to vote, Aunt Elva received the rejection that she could not, in fact, vote because she was not considered an American anymore.
This is just so incredible. And I mean, this was discriminatory against any woman who married an “outsider” quote-unquote race, but it was even more draconian for women who married Chinese immigrants. Because Chinese were not allowed in that period to naturalize and become citizens.
So I don't even know, I don't think Aunt Elva actually got her citizenship back because I think she passed away before she would have been able to do it.
So I wanna go back a little bit more to the Exclusion Act and the different permutations it went through. It started as bad, but it actually got worse as time went on. And so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the trajectory of this act and why did it become more restrictive, even more restrictive over time? And in fact, why did it come about to begin with?
Yeah, yeah, all really great questions. So let me contextualize.
In the 1870s, after the completion of the railroad, with the railroad, of course, you had many Chinese workers, Chinese laborers, who built the most arduous, the most difficult part of the railroad through the Sierra Nevadas, right, out in California. And this is the period in time in which my family members came and worked on the railroad.
After the completion of the railroad, several things happened, including there was over-speculation on the railroad and a run on banks. And for the first time, Wall Street had to be shut. So the country enters a great economic depression. In fact, they called it the Great Depression before the Great Depression of the 20th century.
So during that period in time, there were European immigrants on the East Coast, white Americans on the East Coast, who, searching for jobs, jumped upon that railroad and headed out West.
What they discovered out West were Chinese people, Chinese men, in manufacturing jobs that they thought should be rightfully theirs. So the anti-Chinese sentiment at the time was incredibly popular. It was so popular that politicians used it as a platform in order to get votes.
So this is a period in time in which the country is in the era of Reconstruction. And in that time period, it should have been a moment of great reform. But unfortunately for us, it was a moment of deep entrenchment.
What you got was West Coast politicians working hand in hand with Southern politicians who were intent upon maintaining supremacy. And they worked together to cut deals to enact the country's first restrictive immigration legislations against Chinese people.
And so, you know, this is a very, very difficult time for being Chinese. And this is a difficult time that my family remembers for being Chinese as well.
So Chinese exclusion is put on the books in 1882. And it doesn't stop until 1943 during World War II when our country needed an ally with China against Japan. And the reasons why Chinese exclusion, basically every 10 years, it kept needing to be renewed.
And instead of it just being the same old renewals, there were tighter and tighter restrictions, more paperwork. It was a greater rigmarole that Chinese people at the time had to cut through in order to come here or to remain.
And what was happening at the same time in our country, unfortunately, was that this dovetailed into the period in the rise of eugenics. So eugenics, you'll remember, you know, I'm not an expert on eugenics, but that was a period in time in which scientists and social scientists were trying to apply the scientific method to the idea of the betterment of the race.
Of course, all of this is completely subjective.
And what ends up happening is we get a lot of, like, like truly horrible things happening, right, in this country forced sterilization of women out in California, the eugenics movement in this country was so popular amongst philanthropists, academics, politicians, you know, incredibly wealthy people that it becomes a kind of a shining star and a beacon for other people outside the country.
And you're probably aware, Francesca, that Nazis in Germany really looked at the American eugenics movement as something to really aspire to. We can only laugh because it's so horrible, right, in recognition of how horrible this is.
So at the same time, our country is scrutinizing its borders. It starts with Chinese folks, and then it becomes more stringent in 1917 and 1924. And in those periods, almost all Asians are excluded from coming into the country. And then there are restrictions against Southern and Eastern Europeans as well.
Yeah, and you know, it was also a time of great repression against the labor movement, and also a time of huge amount of racial terror exercised on African Americans. So it's all kind of a piece. But there was one thing that kind of blew a hole in the wall of Chinese exclusion, and that was the San Francisco earthquake. Talk about what happened, and also how that impacted your own family.
So during this time period, right before 1906, Chinese people had a really difficult time getting into the country. When the laws are that restrictive, people will find a way to come in, and they will circumnavigate the laws as best they can, unfortunately.
And so what happens though, is that in 1906, in April of 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake occurs. And the shocks are felt all the way from Oregon, all the way down to Los Angeles, but they also spark these great fires throughout the city of San Francisco.
And one of the things that catches fire is the city hall and the records building. And in those records buildings were the birth certificates and death certificates of countless San Franciscans.
What that meant was that when Chinese people came to the border and were scrutinized by, and interrogated by immigration officials, what Chinese people could now say was, well, actually I was born in San Francisco. My records were in the city hall, which burnt down.
And by birthright citizenship, as we know, when you're born in America, when you're born in the US, you have citizenship. So that's what they said. It wasn't necessarily the truth.
And these were paper families that actually allowed some of your own relatives to come over, is that right?
That's right. So my grandfather, who was the grandson of the railroad builder, was able to come in during World War II, when a lot of Chinese people were fleeing the country because it was occupied by the Japanese army. My grandfather bought papers to allow him to come into the country.
He got stuck in detention for three months. He was 16 years old, but those papers enabled him to eventually be released.
And he makes his way out to New York, where he meets my grandmother. And it's a whirlwind relationship. And there's a lot of there there with their relationship as well. And there are so many countless stories in this book that just read so well.
Now, how were you able to reconstruct dialogue? I mean, I know some of it was imagined, but you did a huge amount of research for this book.
Yeah, so I do mention in the foreword that I was not present when people were having their conversations. That's why a lot of the dialogue part, and I put that in quotes, is actually in italics.
How I reconstructed these scenes was through doing an enormous amount of research.
These stories were based on stories that I heard in childhood. They're based on interviews that I conducted with different family members throughout the decades. They're also constructed from documents, written documents that my family members left behind that I often found after they had long since passed away. So there were the family documents and the interviews, but there was also the research that I did outside the boundaries of the family.
I won a Fulbright to China. And in 2017, I took my family with me and we moved to China for the semester so that I could do the research in our villages. And there I was able to collect genealogy documents, many of which had narratives attached to them, narratives about important members of the family.
Sometimes I was really lucky and it pertained to our branch or somebody that I had heard about. And I was also able to interview the villagers who remembered the family members.
I was actually astonished. I went to Dek Foon's village, which was also my great-grandfather's village. And I asked them questions and they all remembered. They didn't remember Dek Foon as much, but they definitely remembered my great-grandfather. And my great-grandfather had left China in the late 1890s. So… That's remarkable.
Yeah, but they remembered him and they remembered the things that he had did during World War II, like to help the cause against Japanese invasion. So people's memories were long and it was a wonderful thing to do the research of this book.
And there were also other documents that are in Chinese that I was able to obtain when I was in China.
There was even, you know, with the fundraisers for the pogrom victims, you know, I even had to do research in Yiddish language newspapers. So I was aided by numerous translators.
Oh, that's great. So I want to also make the link to today because you make it in this book, Mott Street, Ava Chin. We've seen a terrifying resurgence of anti-AAPI hate. My daughter-in-law is Japanese and she's talked to me about how frightened she was living in New York and now she's living upstate New York where she feels even more frightened. She feels that people, you know, look at her strangely and it's impacted your life as well. Not to speak of that we have a huge amount of anti-immigrant hysteria, not just towards AAPI people, but you know, people in general. Talk about how this has impacted your life and draw the connections for us.
Yeah. So I, when I was working on the book, I was coming down to Chinatown and it was right around the time of the pandemic. And I witnessed the ways in which Chinatown was deeply impacted under the pandemic. Businesses were shuttered because people were too afraid to come down here.
And then there was the rise in anti-Asian violence that was certainly perpetuated by the anti-Chinese rhetoric that our last president was espousing. It was terrifying and really sobering to realize that, you know, I'm a fifth generation New Yorker and New York was the one place where I really feel at home. But I've had friends who have been attacked and the attacks have made it on the evening news. And it's very sobering and disheartening to see this happening.
On the other hand, this is something that was not unfamiliar to my family and within our family history in America. It appeared as if the rise in violence, you know, coincided with COVID.
But I believe that the roots of the violence, the seeds of it, really were sown in the mid 19th century with the establishment of Chinese exclusion. It's just that people don't know that history or have simply forgotten it.
And they will learn that history in reading your book, Mott Street. I highly recommend it to my listeners. It was just a terrific read. Ava Chin, it's just been a delight to talk with you about your book.
Thank you so much for having me on your show, Francesca.