Conversations from the Cullman Center: Mott Street: Ava Chin with Maya Jasanoff
A narrative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act told through four generations of one family.
For Ava Chin, understanding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring Chinese immigrants from United States citizenship–the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality. Chin traces the story of her pioneering relatives, their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows them to New York’s Chinatown, where she discovers a single building on Mott Street where many of her ancestors lived. Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming tells the stories of the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, and activists, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the exclusion laws.
Ava Chin wrote Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming during her 2017–2018 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss the book with historian Maya Jasanoff.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Ava Chin is the author of Eating Wildly, winner of the Les Dames d’Escoffier International M.F.K. Fisher Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among other venues. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She teaches creative nonfiction at the City University of New York.
Maya Jasanoff is Professor of History at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She is the author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Edge of Empire, and Liberty’s Exiles, and she is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Washington Book Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2006-2007.
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In-Person
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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.