Hi everyone. Today we're playing a repeat of one of our favourite shows. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm Lale Arakoglu and welcome to a new episode of Women Who Travel.

Today, our story unfolds not far from the Condonass Traveler offices in One World Trade Center.

It's a tale that spans generations of a family coming from China to America,

via various routes and settling in Lower Manhattan's Chinatown, a place I visit often.

Telling this story is my guest, Ava Chin, whose memoir, Mott Street, a Chinese-American family's story of exclusion and homecoming, came out this spring.

One of the main characters of her story is 37 Mott Street, a multi-apartment building

constructed in 1915 on the corner of Mott and Pell.

Over the course of her painstaken research for the book,

Ava discovers that different strains of her family converged in this building over a period of four decades.

This family that basically hated each other by the time I was born

were, in fact, upstairs, downstairs neighbors from each other by the time I was born, were, in fact, upstairs, downstairs

neighbors from each other who went to the same churches, were in Boy Scouts together,

summered out on the Jersey Shore together, right, went to school together, ate dinner at each other's

kitchen tables, and they were all not just connected through this building

and through common language ties and cultural ties

because they were originally from the same parts of southern China,

but that they were all living here.

By the way, I've counted at least 49 family members that I've lived there.

And every time, like, when I started working on the research and talking to people and

former residents there, what was so lovely was that there was a period in time in which I felt

that my ancestors were leaving little breadcrumbs for me through the story.

...