MOTT STREET

A Chinese American writer searches for roots not easily uncovered.

“My family is a noisy, bothersome bunch—bursting through the walls and hallways as I tried to doze; talking to me through the memories of old friends, eyes brimming with recollection like a teacup about to overflow; egging me on to continue….” So writes Chin, a fifth-generation Chinese American and lifelong New Yorker at the center of whose universe stands the street of her title. Lower Mott Street is a wonderland of food and culture, defined by “giant, elaborate meals of long, pan-fried egg noodles with sliced beef, chicken, pork, and verdant gai lan vegetables as long as my chopsticks,” among other delicacies. But life was not always so abundant. As Chin writes, her ancestors had to endure an extraordinary regime of racist laws that made clear they were not wanted. Coloring this past were official documents that were often misleading or indifferent, such that oral history proved to be much more trustworthy than “the historical record that is a fabulist fabrication.” An initial challenge was finding the father who effectively abandoned her family and learning why. From there, Chin explores ancestors who arrived more than a century and a half ago to build the transcontinental railroad, excluded from ordinary society by, among other things, being barred from testifying against Whites in court cases. Some ancestors were prosperous, some forced into indentured servitude, but all reduced by those racist laws to “paper people—flat, two-dimensional sheets of biographical fiction.” In this elegantly written, probing narrative, Chin adds weight and substance to those near caricatures, an act of filial homage that ends with the arresting image of “the mothers of Mott Street” revivified.

A lively memoir that limns a long family history and helps us understand the troubled history of our nation.