 From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. This story goes back to a period in time when the young country was asking itself, who is one of us and who is not? And the decisions that they made back then in the 19th century set us on a course as a nation towards viewing all Asians as being foreign and suspicious. And so the great aim of this book is to place Asian Americans into our proper space into the larger American story. I'm really excited to be having this conversation today with my former colleague and longtime friend Ava Chin. She's a professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the City University of New York. And her latest book is a really personal one. It's called Mott Street, a Chinese American family story of exclusion and homecoming. And as the title suggests, the book focuses on themes of exclusion as it relates to all Chinese Americans, plus personally for Ava as she tries to relate to her father. And the book explores how that exclusion, particularly the Chinese Exclusion Act, forms the foundation for the recent rise in anti-Asian violence. Ava, in so many ways, this is the book that I've been waiting to read. I wanted somebody to make sense of what was happening around me. And you've done it in this really page-turning way. And this historical, really personal story is all tied to one building in New York City's Chinatown on Mott Street. Before we start talking, I just have to say I am totally thrilled to be here. You know, it's been a while, right? It's been a while. You and I have known each other a very long time. When we knew each other, we had different positions. Yes. We're both living in New York. We worked at the same publications. Yes. You know. We worked at two of the same publications, maybe even three. Oh, yes. That's right. So that puts us in the 1990s during the height of the grunge era when hip-hop began selling in record numbers so that wide executives at record labels began to understand the importance of hip-hop, right? When hip-hop became pop, they started. Yeah, when hip-hop became pop, that's right. So that's the era in which I, as a young person in my 20s, really started looking for my father, this father who I never met, who's the entire side of the family I was estranged from because the rift between our family was so great after my dad walked out that nobody talked to each other again. And this really impacted my life. And you know that because you knew me in that period. So that really was the beginnings of my actively researching the story and trying to put the pieces together. And what happened when I finally found my father, and that first meeting when we first met in Chinatown in mid-February, it was the evening, I met him at his office on Pell Street. You know, traditionally, old New York's Chinatown was traditionally three blocks. So we walked down Pell Street, and he started pointing out things to me. Like, you see that over there? That shop is where our family had our first store, which we turned into Chinatown's first coffee shop. And that place over there, when I was growing up, that used to be an opium den. And then he pointed straight ahead to this six-floor red brick apartment building and said, you see that window over there? That's where my grandparents, your great-grandparents used to live. And right over there is where I was born and where your grandparents lived. So all of a sudden, just in one meeting, I knew that my dad's side of the family occupied more than one apartment. And then I found out much later several apartments on several floors. A couple of years later that I realized when I was talking on the phone to the grandmother who raised me, who she told me where she was born, and I asked her the address, and it was the same address where my father was born. And then later I find out after interviewing other family members, that in fact, generations before, the family had been upstairs, downstairs neighbors from each other. Why, you call the book Mott Street? Yeah. Everything came from Mott Street, right? It's where they lived. It's where they worked. It was right around the corner from their churches, their schools, the Chinese school, their associations were on the block. You know, it was all right there. We got to talk for a minute about your estranged dad, because the reason you found out about Mott Street was that you went to go visit. You found out who Stanley Chin was. Yes, I did. You hadn't met him before? Right. The crown prince of Chinatown? Yes. So I grew up raised by single mother and not knowing who my father was. I had never met him. I was really yearning to understand who he was, who this family was, that I only ever heard about, spoken about in whispers. I heard that they were big wigs in Chinatown. I had no idea what that meant. And I had all of these questions about who they were. And so this great mystery and this yearning to understand him really set me on a path towards trying to understand myself in relation to my father, my father in relation to the other men who raised him, who was his grandfather, who was the head of Unlong Tong, which was the Merchants Association. By the time I was growing up, the Merchants Association and the Rival Association, called the Hipsing Association, they were connected to these rival gangs in Chinatown. And they were often referred in the English language media as the Chinese mafia. So what was this? So I started asking a lot of these questions. And people didn't really have a lot of answers for me. But they did have documents. My paternal grandfather, whose name was Long Chen, whose obituary I found when I was working in the village voice, told me. They called him Pop. So in the book, I call him by his name Long. But colloquially, we refer to him in the community as Pop. One of the things Pop did, luckily for me, is he left an oral history at the Chinatown History Project, which was the early seeds for the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. And he also left notes for a book that he wanted to write about his relationship with his father. And it explains a lot. He really had a sense that there was a larger story at work. He just ran out of time before he was able to finish writing it. Pop left all of these little breadcrumbs towards the larger story behind for me to find. Throughout working on and researching this book, I've often felt that my ancestors, who I never met directly, were leaving behind these clues for me to pick up and find the larger story. In the book, you talk about the significance of the view when you're upstairs in that apartment, which is now your writing studio. Can you tell me about that view and the significance of it? I've counted at least 49 family members who have lived in this building. And I've been inside many of the apartments. It's the front-facing apartments that are the most coveted because they have these views of the street. Our building is situated at the bend of Mott Street and then is intersected by Pell Street. Traditionally, Chinatown was three streets. Mott, Pell, and Doryer Street. And it's from the front part of our building that my great-grandmothers had this panoramic 180-degree view of the neighborhood. They could see their husbands going to and from work. They could see extended family members in their offices. They were able to witness parades. There were even raids that happened in Chinatown. And you could see folks entering the building towards the back of the buildings in the height of the Tonguers. They were able to hear gunshots that happened in the back of the building that police officers on Mott Street couldn't hear. There's a way that the building and the neighborhood are both characters in the story. Over now, situated in New York's Chinatown, you've given us a tiny bit of that history. Your book weaves that history throughout five generations. You're a fifth generation New Yorker yourself. I want to take us to present day Chinatown that things really changed in Chinatown during the pandemic, in part because of anti-Chinese sentiments tied to the origins of the coronavirus and rhetoric from our last president. Thank you, rhetoric from the last president and other places as well. Can you describe what you saw happening there? So it was really sobering watching the ways in which Chinatown was deeply impacted by all of these factors that we just listed out. There were a lot of early shuttering of businesses because people were just too afraid to come down here. Later came the attacks on members of the community. I did start a self-defense group for Asian-American women, elders, and folks from the LGBTQ communities. They named that group that Sisters in Self-Defense. Yes, Sisters in Self-Defense. We started right after the Atlanta shootings and we felt that it was really important to, number one, provide a space for the community to come together and grieve, but also learn techniques where they could help themselves if they were encountering difficult situations. And that felt good to be able to provide that. In the beginning, we did it as a Zoom call and we had folks calling in from Berlin, Canada, New York, all different parts of the United States, and it was intergenerational. There were grandparents and their grandkids. There were mothers and daughters. But of course, the violence was intergenerational. Yeah, yeah. So it felt good to be able to create a space for that, but it was still really hard. And then I know people who were attacked and one of them happened to be a friend of mine who was coming to our classes. And that was really rough. She was punched in the face, knocked down to the ground on Mulberry Street, and it was very difficult to watch the videos on the news. And I just heard so many things about people being attacked on Canal Street, women were being murdered. You know, it was just so, so, so difficult. And I'm working on this book where my family members were at risk. So that was hard. Sometimes when we talk about the anti-Asian hatred and violence that has come about now under the pandemic, I think, maybe people don't understand that the roots of this violence have been long simmering since the 19th century, since that period in time in which it was very popular to be anti-Chinese in this country and then anti-Asian. And it fomented into the Chinese Exclusion Act laws which prevented legal Chinese immigration into the United States and blocked a pathway towards our citizenship for 61 years. It lasted from 1882 to 1943 during World War II when the U.S. needed China as an ally in the war. And it still continued in terms of a very stingy quota that only allowed 105 Chinese in per year until the 1960s, until the 1965 Immigration Act. So let's go back in time then. Let's go back in time for a bit because in many ways what you've just done for us is what you do in your book, which is you trace the roots of the current anti-Asian violence to anti-Asian policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. One of the things that you talk about in your book is as you talk about doing the research, you talk about encountering the official historic record and you talk about Jack's deposing that record with what you've been told yourself and the oral history that you collected and the bits of history that you pieced together, things that you've been told by your grandparents. One of the stories that I remember reading in your book is that you heard stories about your great-grandfather who worked on the railroad. Yes. Then your first experience of going to school and seeing pictures of railroad workers and not seeing any Chinese faces. So maybe take me back to that moment from when you were a kid, how did you feel about that as a kid? One of the first stories I ever heard from the family that raised me was that I was descended from a Chinese railroad worker who had worked and helped build the nation's first transcontinental railroad. And these stories to me were nothing short of marvelous. My grandfather who was the grandson of the railroad worker told me these stories. He heard them directly from his grandfather when he was growing up in Southern China. So our family's love of the railroad was so great that my grandfather who was born and raised in a small village in Toisan which is the four counties of Guangdong province. His first words in English and China were Central Pacific, Union Pacific and Southern Pacific. It was the names of the railroads. Now I'm like three, four years old when my grandfather tells me these stories. And then I grew up and I entered grade school and my teacher is teaching us about the transcontinental railroad. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about the railroad, right? Because my great-great grandfather helped to build it and I've been hearing these stories since I was a child. And then I opened up the big textbook and I look at that photograph, the official photograph that the railroad companies put out and there was not a single Chinese face staring back at me. And I just think to myself, what is this nonsense? What are they trying to say? As a child, did you see that as an overt attempt at exclusion? I would not have been able to say the word exclusion but I knew we were being erased, right? From the story. And then when I open up the textbook and I see the photograph, I think that's the moment in which I realized that I wanted to be a writer. You know, that there were stories about the lived experience of my family members and other people like them that really needed to be told. When that weren't being told when I was growing up or they weren't being told in the official record or in the media, they were being told at home. So good thing you're an adult and a scholar now. Yes, that's right. And now you can tell us about the role of the railroads in the historic exclusion of Chinese Americans. And it was around the time that the railroads were being built and finished that the Chinese Exclusion Act came into being. Yes, that's right. The railroad was completed in 1869 and the country is then in the era of reconstruction. And this should have been a time in which it was an opportunity for great reform, right? But instead, our politicians failed us and this becomes a time of deep entrenchment. So what you get is Southern politicians who are intent upon supremacy work hand in hand striking deals with West Coast politicians and politicians out West, I should say, cause it wasn't just the West Coast. It was politicians in Nevada and Idaho as well as politicians in California and Washington state who worked hand in hand in enacting these exclusionary legislation against Chinese. And what was also happening at that time was there was this great depression that happened in the 1870s after the railroad was completed. So there had been over-speculation on the railroad, banks failed, all of a sudden this great depression happens and you get the ugliest sentiments that people in the majority have. And so you see immigrants, white immigrants, right? And folks from the East Coast traveling on that railroad, looking for jobs, winding up out West and seeing Chinese in manufacturing jobs, logging jobs, car manufacturing jobs, jobs that those white people thought should be theirs. And so it becomes incredibly popular to be anti-Chinese judges, politicians, elected officials ride that bandwagon and use that as a way to exclude us. I like the way you say that they rode the railroad, that they're going out West using the railroad that was built by the hands and the laborer of Chinese workers. All of this culminates in this discriminatory legislation that keeps Chinese people out. This violence forces my family members to make a decision. Some of them have to decide are they gonna stay here and wait till the violence comes to their door or are they gonna go back to San Francisco where they originally landed? Some family members did indeed go back to China like our railroad worker. Other family members jump on that railroad, do a reverse migration across the country and then land in New York City's Chinatown, which was this burgeoning place of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual neighborhood. They settle here, they try to lay down roots in the English language newspapers. All these questions, is this a Chinese exodus? Like what is this? And yeah, it is an exodus. From the west, from the western part of the United States. So one of the stories that I love reading about in your book because I don't think I've ever read anything like it anywhere else is the story about your uncle who works with the Chinese Equal Rights League. And this league, you have to tell us a little bit about this. This is an opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act has been around for 10 years at this point and your uncle was among those trying to fight it. Right. Trying to fight the renewal of it and also a similar piece of legislation that was being passed. Right, 10 years after Chinese Exclusion is already on the books and it's due to expire and Congress decides to continue it for another 10 years but add even further restrictions. They add a surveillance component. All Chinese need to be photographed. They need to carry identification papers on them at all times. If anybody asked them about this, it can be a citizen on the street. If any white person asked them to show their papers and they don't have the papers, they can get a year's worth of hard labor and deportation. And the photographing at this period in time really is only being done to criminals whose photographs are being hung in rogues, galleries and police stations. So the fact that the government is then asking for Chinese to sit for these photographs is really deeply humiliating, right? And unprecedented. So my uncle and his friends, including the writer, Wang Chenfu were part of this organization that rallied together and that coalition build across the aisle to their Jewish neighbors from the Lower East Side, black ministers from Harlem, Irish pastors, folks in Philadelphia, folks in Boston. They worked with the children of famous abolitionists in Boston to really try to come together to speak out against this continuation of exclusion. Isn't it amazing when you think about that kind of coalition building, like way before they had access to, I don't know, even forget about a phone, right? There's no like text message, like you have to really, there was the printing press. So they were like printing out pamphlets. It was wonderful to know that they spoke out against exclusion and they fought against it. But it is really wonderful to read about the resistance, I think it's part of it. A lot of times when we hear some of these stories you hear about things like the white riots that went through Chinatown, destroying property around this time, but also around the 1920s. But we don't really hear so much about this kind of resistance that you're talking about, this coalition building. Yeah, it's important to know about it because otherwise you just get this very slanted view of history. One of the other things that you write about is the role of labor movements in the anti-Asian sentiments. And can you tell us a little bit about when and how that started? So I grew up hearing that song, look for the union label, right? And I used to sing that jingle. And so I did a lot of labor organizing work in New York's Chinatown around the issue of restaurant labor, garment factory labor, even a little bit of construction labor. So it broke my heart when I realized that the earliest iterations of the unions, go back to the cigar makers union when Samuel Gompers was the head of the cigar makers union. And the label that you were supposed to look for was the white hand of labor with a knife knifing a Chinese dragon. That's really hard to hear. Yeah, it's sad. It's really sad. I've had conversations with historians who study labor history and they have a hard time dealing with the race factor because I'm like, it shouldn't have been that way. And they're like, well, you know, almost excusing it. You linked that to the birth of eugenics. Chinese exclusion dovetails with the eugenics movement in this country. And it was really popular amongst politicians, intellectuals, educators. It broke my heart when I realized that my great-grandmother who entered the country in 1914 in her third trimester, right, heavily pregnant, she traveled with her husband and her two young children. When she entered, she got stuck in the Angel Island Detention Center. Unlike Ellis Island, which was a welcome center slash immigration station, Angel Island is a detention center. It is segregated. Chinese are separated from other races and nationalities. The women are separated from the men. The state medical examiner was an ardent eugenicist and he believed that eugenics was best practice at the border. And so my great-grandmother had to suffer through humiliating physical examinations while she was living in the detention center. There were Chinese Exclusion Act files on every Chinese who came and left the country, right? And so I was able to find these files on all of my family members. And in her file, she has to answer like 72 questions in her interrogation. And there's one point where they ask her a question and she just kind of throws it back at them. She goes really lippy. And in all of my years of looking through exclusion files, I've never seen anybody give a bit of sass back to the inspectors, right? Because these people can deport you. So I really have to applaud her for being lippy during her interrogation. For pushing back even in her photo and in her words that she pushed back as much as she could. Yeah, yeah. Okay, last few minutes. What were you hoping when you sat down to start writing this book? Okay, so when I first started working on this book, I thought I was trying to uncover the story of my family. Then as time went on, I realized that the story was much larger than any single individual that this story was a part of a larger legacy of what it means to be Chinese in America, right? This story goes back to a period in time in the era of reconstruction when the young country was asking itself who is an American and who is not? Who is one of us and who is not? And the decisions that they made back then in the 19th century set us on a course as a nation towards viewing all Asians as being foreign and suspicious. And so the great aim of this book is to shed light on Asian American stories and place Asian Americans into our proper space into the larger American story. Boom. That was beautiful. Thanks, Vinny. I really wish we had time to talk about your graves. My uncle who fought back against exclusion with his friends, Uncle Deck married a woman, a white woman who was born in Pennsylvania and the daughter of a Civil War veteran. And it is not easy because this is an era in the early part of the 20th century when most families would disown their daughters for marrying outside the race. When Aunt Elva died, she really wanted to be buried next to Uncle Deck. They would not let her be buried next to her husband. They took the body away and they buried her in their family plot, but in the family plot, the headstone doesn't even have her name on it. I was just incensed by this and I went back to both of their grave sites. One's buried in the Bronx. The other is buried deep into Brooklyn and I was able to bring their earth to each other. I went to Uncle Deck's grave. I got a little bit of his dirt. You're not supposed to do that by the way. A little spoon full of dirt. And I brought it to Aunt Elva's grave and I put him, his that dirt on her grave and then I took a little bit of her dirt and I brought it back to the Bronx and I added it to his plot. And that was my way of bringing them together. That's beautiful. That's the resistance. So it is. Sometimes the resistance is a spoon full of dirt. Thank you very much for your time, Ava. It's been really nice to talk to you. Thank you, Vinita. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I really enjoyed my conversation with Ava Chin and in case you want to read more about it, besides picking up her book, you can visit our show notes on our website, which is theconversation.com. On our site, you can see a photo of the couple that Ava spoke about at the end of our conversation. In fact, you can see the whole family photo. It's beautiful and worth the time, trust me. To chat with me and our team, you can get in touch on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast. And if you like what you heard today, please consider sharing this pod with a friend or a family member and write us a review on whatever podcast app you use. And if you haven't done this already, don't forget to follow us on your podcast app. It means that you won't miss an episode. And if you have story ideas that you'd love to hear us cover, I'd love to hear from you, email me at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Venita Srivastava. Bokeh Sai Si is our producer. Oli Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Remitula Shake. Atika Kaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Thaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.