A sweeping narrative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act through an intimate portrayal of one family's epic journey to lay down roots in America A Good Morning America, Time, Book Riot, and Kirkus Most-Anticipated Book 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.