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A review by siria
Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin
emotional
informative
3.75
Mott Street is the most prominent street in New York City's Chinatown, and it's where many of author Ava Chin's ancestors settled on their arrival in the United States in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It's also the fulcrum around which this book is organised, as Chin delves into both four generations of her own family's history and the history of Chinese migration to the U.S. There are many vibrant figures on Chin's family tree, whether related to her by birth or by marriage—one grandfather ran the first coffee shop in Chinatown; one great-great-uncle found an enduring love match with a Swedish-American intersex woman—who lived through many momentous events in modern history.
This is a wide-ranging book on a topic that Chin is clearly passionate about, and it's well worth the read if you have a curiosity about this time and place. However, I thought that Mott Street wasn't structured in the most effective manner, and the imagined dialogue that Chin sometimes places in her ancestors' mouths (although thankfully set off in italics from the rest of the text) often displayed some of the worst tendencies of historical fiction.
This is a wide-ranging book on a topic that Chin is clearly passionate about, and it's well worth the read if you have a curiosity about this time and place. However, I thought that Mott Street wasn't structured in the most effective manner, and the imagined dialogue that Chin sometimes places in her ancestors' mouths (although thankfully set off in italics from the rest of the text) often displayed some of the worst tendencies of historical fiction.