A review by finnthehuman217
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin

5.0

I’ve never felt so much pressure writing a Goodreads review!! lol I have a love of stories about people who are different. Ava Chin’s family is different. She is a 5th generation Chinese American. She is a professor at CSI and she grew up with a single mother. This is a perfect story because it is an attempt to track down her family via records and archives, doing a full genealogy and weaving a story of uncles who are in business together, a great grandfather who was a gambler and into all the vices, an interracial marriage with her uncle Dek and aunt elva (who is harboring a secret that was the demise of her first marriage) This book reminds me that the teachers we have are full people who have history and they don’t just get there through luck, sometimes their families have a hard time. Ava, whose class I took twice during the pandemic, has taught me to write about trauma I’ve faced and taught me that sometimes even if it’s boring, research about family history can be a story all on it’s own. The amount of time her Ng-Doshim family met with her Chin family while living in the same building (that not being how mom and dad met) reminded me that our world is smaller than we think it is, even with how many people are here. The history of Chinese folks in America is a sordid one. With laws excluding their immigration and making it hard to live life in safety. This book is important for not only these two families but the history of America and the fact that Chinese exclusion continues in certain ways to this day but with different types of people. I am in awe of Ava!!