Public Lecture: Professor Ava Chin, 'The Elastic Heart: Writing an Epic Family Memoir'

This event is part of our programme supporting Global Majority and Underrepresented Writers.  Further details about the Programme are available here.

Professor Ava Chin, the award-winning author of Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, addresses the joys and challenges of tackling large societal issues like immigration and belonging through the lens of four generations of her family. This talk provides a toolkit for life-writers.

About Mott Street:

‘Essential reading for understanding not just Chinese American history but American history—and the American present’

—Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

‘The Angela’s Ashes for Chinese Americans’

—Miwa Messer, Poured Over podcast

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 realises that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.

About Mott Street

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Speaker Details:

Ava Chin is an author, journalist, and Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the City University of New York (Graduate Centre, where she is the head of American Studies, and the College of Staten Island). She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, University of Oxford.

She is the author of the award-winning memoir Mott Street (Penguin Press, 2023), winner of the CALA Best Book Award and a PEN/Open Book Award Finalist, and Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), which won the M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. Mott Street, an ALA Notable Book and one of People magazine’s top books by Asian American authors, was a Best Book of the year in TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Elle. Ava has appeared on NPR, PBS, and CSPAN, among others. Ava Chin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Marie Claire, and SPIN. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Centre for Scholars & Writers, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, and the New York Institute for the Humanities, where she is a board member. A former slam poet, she has performed on numerous stages such as Joe’s Pub, the Knitting Factory, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and Woodstock ‘94, and contributed lyrics to Soul Coughing’s El Oso. The Huffington Post named her one of ‘Nine Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading’.

Further Details and Contacts:

After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception and book sale by Caper (@caperoxford ).

This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended.

This is an in-person event, but will be recorded and made available soon after on the OCLW website.

Registration will close at 10:30 am on 11 June 2025.

Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to  OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson .