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Wider Net Book Group

Mott Street by Ava Chin

Wider Net Book Group will meet in person to discuss Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin.

Do you enjoy reading a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction titles? Wider Net Book Group reads modern classics and contemporary fiction, biographies, history and other non-fiction titles. 

Wider Net Book Group will meet in person in the Small Meeting Room (108) to discuss Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin.

"As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.

Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.

In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities.  She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one." - From the publisher

For more information contact call 847-448-8620 or email: atomcik@cityofevanston.org

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