Fan and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. Shop now or anytime at cspan shop. Org. A healthy democracy doesnt just look like this. It looks like this. Where americans can see democracy at work, where citizens are truly come up republic thrice. Get informed straight from the source on cspan. Unfiltered, unbiased, word for word from the Nations Capital to wherever you are. Because the opinion that matters most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan, powered by cable. Its a really delightful to be with you and to talk about your new book mott street here it covers such a wide amount of time and space. It was really aiv riveting read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and i am really looking forward to our conversation today. Guest thank you. Its really actually e with you. Host yeah, i would like to start by just simply asking about the Research Project itself. Being a historian i was fascinated by all the different kinds of things that you looking at from the official records held in the National Archives, newspapers, census records, family photographs, although it. It sounded like from the way you describe the process you basically have been researching this Family History for very long time. So maybe you could start by taking us back to when you first start to think about writing a Family History of researching your Family History and what brought you there. Guest sure absolutely. Thanki you. I just want to say that mott street i aut impact of the chinese exclusion act laws, four generations of my family newna yorks chinatown as we landed out in the american west, then did a reverse migration across country before eventually landing in the same tenement Apartment Building in the heart of new york city on mott street. And it really is about my journey to understand my family, and then how i uncovered so much more. So youre absolutely right that this book goes back so far in terms of my own genesis as a young person growing up as a fifthgeneration chineseamerican in new york i was estranged from my father, raised by a single mom so i didnt know my dads side of the family pair and yet i also i did know that it was a descendent and a proud descendent of a Chinese Railroad worker pure and so a lot of the stories that i heard growing up, they were not reflective in history books that i read are the on the ls taught when i was in school. And so part of the impetus of this book was really to try to rectify the family stories with what i was learning. So to get back to your question about the research, i would say that so the short answer is that i started researchingg this bok from 2015 onwards, like from 2015 onwards it was my soul project here but in actuality i have been collecting these stories ever since i was a child. One of the first was i ever heard was about my greatgreatgrandfather who worked on the nations first Transcontinental Railroad, which united the country after the civil war. So there were those oral stories that i heard that were so compelling to me as a young person. And but then there was the research, to answer your research question, there was the research that happened as an adult. We can kind ofl take this in several stages, because i know that some of the research that i did happens in the 90s in a local archive in new york which has its genesis as the chinatown history project, then became the chinatown history museum. And back in the 90s when i discovered that my chin grandfather who i did not know growing up because i was estranged from that side of the family, i knew from his obituary that he had an oral history at the museum. And all the way back then i was in search of that oral history. I did not get my hands on that oral history until some 20 something years later, but i can say i would love to give a shout out to all of the many people who are working in local archives, particularly archives for marginalized communities where larger museums are not saving these important archives of individuals who have important stories to tell. If those young budding historians did not do that work back then, i dont think i could have done significant sections of this book. So its a shout out to those folks, and i know that you as well used to work out that museum, am i correct . Trendline yes. That was the amazing piece of this was that when it picked up the book and saw mott street as a title, i had a feeling i would be familiar with much of what you were talking about but i didnt realize how familiar i would be and the oral history you talk about with your grandfather popped chin avenue had back then was something that i actually did encounter when i was in the museum back then. So when i started from 1980 to sorry, 1989 until about early 1990s maybe we were, near chinatown history project later became thete museum for a minute and now it is now known as the museum of chinese and the americas. But thats an incredible intersection of lives in stories and research which i think thats what a lot of your book is about is these incredible intersections that until you dig into them you dont realize theyre happening and you are having us crisscross across the country as much as staying on mott street in terms of unraveling this history. So just to get back to some of those Amazing Things you are telling us, so which grandfather is it that you knew had a history that went back to the Transcontinental Railroad . Guest so thisro was to my grandpa jean, jean paul who is the amazing guatemala and uptown who cooked up amazing meals for us, and he told me incredible stories about ourd railroad ancestor. The railroad was so important to our family, not just because the work that was accomplished that help bridge thiss divide between east and west so that from coasttocoast the country was united physically, but within her own family there was so much pride about the fact that my greatgreatgrandfather had worked on and labored, and the labor was so intense, right . So many men died. So many chinese men gave up their lives, right, to complete this railroad. My greatgreatgrandfather survived, and there was so much pride in the story that he taught his grandson, my grandfather his first wordsor in english, which were the names of the Transcontinental Railroad. So those were some of the first family stories that i ever heard here and i found them nothing short of inspiring. In my research i did go back to where the railroad was completed in utah appeared i also went to boise, idaho, where my railroad working ancestor ended up living for almost 30 years, and a period and type in which the state population of idaho was almost 30 chinese. Uncovering these stories was so personally moving for me, but it also spoke to something larger that was happening in the u. S. At that time. That sparked my imagination but also made me realize that there was a great big gaping hole in terms of the history that i was taught. If i wasnt taught this history as a young child i might not have really know about it if i was just going about my business being a student. Host yes, and one of the things that i think is so powerful in the book is that this is not a straightforward narrative about your family. Its just as much about you uncovering that history and the ways in which there are surprises along the way some of it very inspiring in terms of your ancestors who we get to meet and spend time with but some extremely heartbreaking and difficult pieces of history to read about. Do you want to Say Something about that . What was it like to go through these histories where your reading so much about the antichinese movement, whether it was political rallies or violence versus finding these moments of your ancestors in the archives and really celebrating their longevity, their survival, their thriving thought wanted to be a little bit about that. Guest sure. This was not the easiest book to research. Some of it, to get back to your question about research, there were times in which i had to you, i crisscrossed my way across the country to local National Archives offices. There are chinese exclusion act files on allmy of the different members of my family. During that period director i should also maybe go back and maybe clarify picked the chinese exclusion act laws started in the 19th century, in 1882, and it lasted for over 60 years and only entered off the books during world war ii when the u. S. Entered world war ii and we needed china as an ally for so a really long period of time were talking about, and so there were files on all of the family members who came in and so, oh, i should also say that chinese exclusion was the first major federal immigration restriction that effectively shut the borders for the very first time against any particular nationality. It halted our Legal Immigration into this country and plot a pathway towards our citizenship for over 60 years. Was also important because it set the tone for future immigration restrictionsar going forward. So that by making 24 there was a ban on nearly all asians from coming over and restrictions against southern and eastern well. Ans as so during this time there are these files on all of my family members. And so i go for the last seven years i i was like going off and trying to find individual files on all of the members. Some people had files across three different come in three different cities across the country. So it was a bit of a detective hunt to try to locate all of these. But what i realized very quickly is that a lot of the files were a pure kind of fiction, right . Fiction because the immigration restriction was so stringent that they became a kind of time it became necessary for folks in order to try to get in to create a kind of story about their own identity, right, claiming that they were somebodys elses son, so and so is a sign or soandsos brother. And so these files uncovering them, uncovering my grandfathers father, grandpa gene, the descendents of the railroad worker, and realizing that it was such a fiction. The only thing that was true was the town in which he was born. It led me to realize that, in fact, writers and historians, we are trained to see the official documents in the official history, things that are written down on paper as having a greater importance than the families stories. But what i soon realized is that when it comes to chinese exclusion, its the families stories that hold the keys to the truth and the official documents that are kind of fabulous fiction that check youf wheat against the grain for. And so the process of working on this book was, was like dealing with three different intersections of dealing with families stories, looking at the official documents, english language newspapers of the time, and my own trying to come up with my best, my best guess of what really actually happened, what was the actual truth as my family members knew it. Host in thats something that is very, very difficult to do using the kinds of sources you are using, especially, it sounds like from what i saw the majority of sources are english sources. Many of them are these official state documented sources that you are describing complex immigration records, Border Crossing records, certificates, residence of certificates, et cetera, that are produced for a certain purpose but not necessarily more about surveillance and tracking for the state thatng it is necessary about telling any kind of truth about a persons life. So its difficult to use those kind of sources. Newspapers are not much better when were dealing with 19th century newspapers. Guest thats right, thats right. Host quite sensationalist. Guest yes, that reflect the viewpoints of the discriminant viewpoints of the day, right . I will say that for my chinese language i resources, i went bak to our villages and i was able to get the genealogy documents. Never genealogies on three of the major families there were that i was researching, so i used those what was great about those is that they cannot just not just add names, sometimes the dates, years of birth and years ofth death, but sometimes i was lucky and they had a narrative that came with them. So narratives about different family members, narratives that i believe either inspired my family members who were here, so i was able to write, to use that. I did you some chinese language sources win, so in 2017 i went on a ride to china so i took my whole family with me and we lived there and thats what i did the bulk of the international research. And so i did you some, i went to the local archives there in our region and was able to sort of Call Information for that appear youre absolutely right that the actual document themselves for this book really were english language sources, you know, census, juno, i used a couple of different historians andd journalists wrote an amazig account of things that happens in early china account of my period, including your book, was a great y source for me, so thak you for that period i cant officially thank you on television for doing that work, so thank you. And yeah, so large part it was english language sources but there were chinese language sources as well. And, of course, all of the oral histories and the myriad, numerous interviews that i i did with family members as well as folks who are former residents of mott street and former residents of chinatown. Host so i do want us to talkov more about, as much as i love talking about the research, cant help it as a historian in me, but you have such amazing family stories and i would love to talk more about those pure and in particular you are really tracing out three i think its three that family the ng doesnt theyre really ngs. Yes yes. Yeah yeah. So youve the three families going and i just wanted to have you talk through what was like, you know, unraveling and then trying to put together the narratives of. These three different families and just say a little bit about who the three of three families are, were and are. Sure. So the three families that im dealing are my paternal chin three families ending with our my paternal chin side as well as my maternal side, my maternal grandmothers family, and my mothers family, her fathers family, the wong family. And what was so interesting about working on this project was that because im fifthgeneration chineseamerican, and my family goes back to the mid19th century, a major iteration of things that impacted Chinese Americans from the mid19th century to today, i was able to write about these historic and historic, social political events that impacted the community through the lands of various family members, just because we have been here for so long. So i felt like i was really, really fortunate. Now, the downside of course is that i had a time, a cast of characters to deal with, right . And so many people i found completely fascinating, right . There was a railroad worker, the grandson of the railroad worke on the wong side. Ive got the other side and the first person who came over to my grandmothers side of the family enters the country just two or three years after the chinese exclusion act is in full effect. He flees a the west coast durina time of very intense heightened antichinese sentiment, lands in new york city, you know, finds the burgeoning chinatown, the thriving chinatown, right, that really came aboutut not just because of language and cultural ties, right, but chinatown across the country became a place of refuge for Chinese People when dealing with weight and scrutiny of the chinese exclusion act loss. So he does this amazing Civic Engagement where hes working with other Chinese Americans to fight and to speak out against the chinese exclusion act allows anther continuation. He ends up marrying a white woman, my aunt alva who, you know, only a couple of years after they get married the government revokes her citizenship c because of the period in timern in which the government thought and believed a womans citizenship should change reflect that of her husbands. So only a couple of years after getting married to our uncle dek foon, she was born in new jersey, who was a daughter of a civil war veteran, comes in the eyes of the law a chinese. Time in which angel island had just been created. Angel island sometimes is called the ellis island of the west coast, but it is in fact a Detention Center. And so my great grandmother. Yes, very different. And so my great grandmother when she arrives, she is heavily pregnant. She has to into this Detention Center that is, you know, shes separated from her husband and the Detention Center, seg she separated from her husband. It is segregated. It broke my heart when i realized that the chief medical examiner of the state was the chief target in genesis. Best employed at the border. So, my greatgrandmother had to endure humiliating physical abomination. I love the version of the photo that you have. This is not a happy womans picture. She has a murderous glare in her i could not agree more. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Imagine being here in your third trimester and youre nauseous. Only to enter a facility that you are not sure what you will get out of. Chinese people had to deal with the chinese exclusion laws. She wasnt a privilege provision by being the wife of a merchant. Luckily not kept in detention for more than about a week and a half. Still, not knowing when you will be let go, it is very difficult. Other people whose files i found where there at the time who spent a lot more time on these islands. It was a very difficult time for chinese trying to come until america. You described, and, by the way, your family tree was very helpful. There were moments wherere i wod get a little bit lost. There are so many fascinating we aremembers that following, you get completely absorbed in their life story. When we moved to another person, sometimes it takes a moment to calibrate and figure out which part of the tree. You can definitely see there are so many other people on the tree ahthat you dont focus on. How do you go about selecting. Are there anyqu family members that if you had the opportunity to write a bigger book, would you put them in . That is a great question. There is this huge test of characters. So many different people it was so fascinating to me. I knew that the frame of this book was incredibly important. The frame of chinese exclusion and the ways in which family members or individual lives are impacted by this discriminatory legislation that lasted for so long on the books. I knew that that was an important frame. What i tried to deal was just follow who are the characters, who are the family members that i was most interested in. Whose storyline did i find most compelling. In a certain way, you can almost look at it like, yes, we are following these different families. Also looking at these different couples. Learning about different individuals before they meet and then what happens when they meet and get married in the ways that their lives are affected. Whether you are chinese or a white person who marries into the family. How are their lives, you know, how are their lives impacted by, you know, this general legislation that has so much impact on them without necessarily may be them 100 realizing it. I will say that even for myself when i was growing up, i had never heard the term chinese exclusion before. It is more like i felt it. It was always there. Whether it was because my grandfather as mail came addressed to somebody elses name, that was one clue. Speaking of the paper son. Exactly. The grandson of somebody who built they railroad. It benefited the entire country. Like grandfather when he came over during world war ii in 1938 had to come over under somebody elsesg identity. To me, that was particularly heartbreaking given how proud he was. How proud he was of the contribution he had made from the country. That is absolutely something we get very clearly in the book. The ways in which the wives intersect. This is your greatgrandfather now who tried to enlist in every war. There are these moments where you are taking us to remember that. There is a sense of belonging, of obligation to this country that your ancestors had despite living in inclusion. For us to sit on that is quite profound, i think. I remember when i was looking through my greatgrandfathers exclusion file. One of the pieces was when he had naturalized. I found it was my grandfather and my fathers side longterm who you mentioned and knew. I dont know if i mentioned it in the book. Both of them actually ended up enlisting even though they were too old. Even though they were heads of household with two Young Children and did not have to enlist, but they did. A couple years when chinese exclusion went off the books and chinese was then able to become naturalized, my greatgrandfather and my father tried as quickly as possible to naturalize because they felt so much that, you know, they had lived here for so long. They had felt as they were, americans. They knew how important it was to naturalize because they had lived in this country for so many decades not being able to. Being completely disenfranchised uncovering a lot of the pieces to the story. For me was both heartbreaking as well as made me incredibly happy and made me filled with quite a lot of pride when id realized what they had done. I was just going to go back to your comment about as much about individuals as it is abouu couples themselves and their relationships with one another. I was going to say, absolutely. What i think is interesting is this is a period where often times, and it makes sense, demographically, we have a lot more men coming through than women and there is a lot of emphasis on the men in terms of their work, they are organizing. You cover much of this, too, in your book. I think what we have not had as richly developed are the lives of the women. The few women that could come in certainly the merchant wives in this case. And you just do such an amazing job rendering the lives of your greatgrandmothers and terms of really giving us a sense of who they were his people, different in terms of class background. Where they were from in china. Such real characters. We get a sense of their internal motivations, their hopes. I think the surprising relationship that sort of builds not to give too much away. I think you just do that so beautifully. How you went about trying to do that when the history that we have been able to write often not been able to do as much with womens voices simply because we do not have as many forces about their lives. Right. Absolutely. You know, it is so difficult because, you know, even if the women were literate, one of my greatgrandmothers was literate, a nurse trained by the missionary society in hong kong, but even she did not leave documents, or at least not any documents that were saved. I think the stories of the women are so important. Often times in terms of written documents, we do not have them. So, what i needed to turn to because i knew that the lives of athe women were so important, what i needed to turn to where the oral stories that my family members had told me. I needed to turn to i was really lucky, again, going back to the work that local historians at small communitybased organizations and institutions were able to do and say those documents. I was lucky that so many of my members either wrote down essaysat and about what life was like about for them. My grandfather, pop, was incredibly close to his mother. And so he talked about her in his oral history. He left notes. He was working on a book himself as well as an oral history and he was working on a family story and he wanted to, he was working and taking notes about his relationship with his own father and, so, he and his brothers, at least two of his brothers, one of whom was still alive by the time i reunited with my family and i was able to interview one summer out on the jersey shore. He was in his 90s already. I was able to use these documents in conjunction with the oral stories that my family members had told me. Bringing life into the women stories. It was also really interesting, the building is so incredibly important in the story. When my family members all arrived to new york in the turnofthecentury, i remember my grandmother telling me that they moved into this one building that was at the heart of the community and this building was considered a luxury building because it had indoor plumbing in every single unit. All of the merchant families rush to move into this building. The thingin that amazed me was when i learned that in fact the two sides of my family that i had never seen before, even in the same room because the estrangement between my families was so vast, i was amazed that when i found out that in fact my family members generations before had been upstairs downstairs neighbors from each other in this building. How old were you when you realize that . That was quite the revelation in the book when you share that with us. I was an adult when i discovered this. I was an adult. I was in my 20s when i met my father for the first time. Throughout my childhood i was always asking questions. I was always that nosy person or that nosyy child in the family asking questions about who we were and where we came from. In fact, that never stopped. Maybe not a mistake that i was a journalist for a number of years i teach journalism and narrative journalism and nonfiction. And, so, you know, when i met my father for the first time when i was in my 20s, he was the one that pointed out the building to me and told me that he was born there. I remember i was interviewing my maternal grandmother and i found out that in fact she had been born right upstairs. And, so, that, you know, it is one thing to have to be interested and to have the frame about, you know, these larger historical forces at work, but to have a setting that is so specific where all of your characters have lived or visited at some point in their young lives or maybe continued to live therefore, you know, over 70 years. Nothing short of incredible. So, there is a way that the building that my family lived in really feels like, felt like it was such a gift. A place of refuge for my family. Such a gift for me to realize how important this building was to our family. I kind of feel like the buildings dna is in my bones. [laughter] a big contradiction on the one hand. They started there and proceeded to go elsewhere, grow, thrive. It was a space that was created because of exclusion because of the inability for many chinese to find lodging of residents in other parts of the city. What was interesting to me also was looking at the book, i was reminded that everyone referred to it as the new building. And they still did in the 90s when i was still working there which was i so funny. When you look at the building it does not look like a new building. All the oldtimers would call it the new building. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. The building was built in 1915. [laughter] eighty somewhat years later still calling it the new building. Some things never change. Right. But, that building in terms of its location, it is like the prime stagest for everything in chinatown. It has an amazing Vantage Point of being able to see so much. Is it the chin family that had the store across the street . Yes. That is onene of the things that isth really wonderful about the book. You really get a sense of the daily lives of the chinese and the. You are talking about whether it is the work life, certainly the leisure life you described some of those things. Which, i was going to ask you about. Did you have any moments where you felt like, oh, i dont know, should i talk about gambling or opium or things that have been these stereotypes of chinatown and how to handle that . Yes. Definitely. I paused because i thought, i paused about the opium references and involvement that certain family members had. Important to contextualize it that when they were doing, when they were originally importing certain narcotic drugs, my father, you know, as my father told me, it was not actually illegal back then. It is not becoming a legal a little bit later on. The other thing is, it will be a while, in terms of talking about the ways in which my family members had to circumnavigate the exclusion. Entering the country and then i really thought about, you know, how is someone else outside of the community, right, readers outside of the community, what are they going to think about this . This reinforces stereotypes of Chinese People being suspicious and dont want to talk about things in this and that. What i realized was so important was actually something that my grandfather said. Two historians. And what he said was if they did not make the laws this way, people would not have had to lie , but because they made the laws this way, people had to lie in order to get in. So i thought, okay, he has contextualized it for me. You know, one of my great hopes in writing this book really is that folks understand what in a very personal way the impact of really restricted unfair discriminatory inflation and how that impacts families, children, mothers and fathers has impact, right, even on us today. So, i think that it is incredibly impta for us to consider that. It was actually one of the great joys of the book knowing that, you know, it would be through my family members that i could tell a personal story about immigration so thatt people coud really understand what the impact of discriminatory legislation was on a family. I think the story as it unfolds over generations really showsthat one could get out of the 1940s and as you say the repeal happens in 1943. It is not as though a magic wand is waived and all that history goes away and it continues to impact the lives of certainly that generation trying to figure out what does it mean to go from excluded to not excluded and yet for some citizenship is not, it is difficult because it still goes back to having to prove ones entry into the country being lawful. Other kinds of documents. It is not a magic cure at all. And then it continues to shape the everyday life of so many that you describe. I am just curious, in terms of, as you just said, going back to the family estrangement in your efforts toy really uncover your familys history and know more about your father, as you are doing the research and it was becoming clear you are writing a book, what was the reaction of everyone around you about what you were doing . That would depend upon who i am talking to, right. There are some people who are like do not air the dirty laundry. And fair enough. There were some people who, even today will not willingly talk to me. And that is all right. I accept that. It is not easy having a writer in the family. There are other people who are totally fascinated by this. And when i talk to folks like my father who was really resistant about talking a lot about the familys history about who eventually ended up talking to me about it, what i had to remind people was that it was not just about us. Any particular individual in the family. This is the much larger story that touchesac upon a larger legacy of exclusions and how it impacted a large segment of the u. S. Population during that time period. So, that i think helped a bit. But, it is never easy, you know, writing a family memoir. It is kind of hard for everybody around. I completely understood, you know, if some folks were more resistant than others. Have you had family members read the book and give you feedback on what theyre thinking . You know what, with other books, my book eating wildly was a book memoir that came out in 2014, with that book, i did offer certain family members the chance to read it. With this book, i did not. Most of the people that i am writing about have long since passed away. I dont feel like anybodys feelings will get hurt. Certainly nobodys legal status is going to be impacted by this book. So, no. The answer to that, professor lou, no, i have not offered other family members the opportunity to read this. Hiwhen the reader reads this, is the same time that the family willk read it. This will be interesting for you to report back on at some point. Yes. Ask me after next week. [laughter]yo right. You said some family members were more available to you in terms of talking and having wonderful stories or at least trying to put the pieces together for you. I am curious about the family, were you able to be in contact with them. Had she even remembered . She did not have children herself. Thats right. I was really curious about that. That was a major moment. A major coup in the research. The white woman who married into the family whose citizenship was revoked a couple years later. And she was transformed into a chinese on paper. I was searching for her family for the longest time. [laughter] i found, i have references to them also family databases. I put out emails. They went into some file. Nobody ever saw. I am really embarrassed to say that an aunt of mine was like, i had asked an aunt of mine if she could help because she had family members in a particular part of queens that i knew the family was living in. That was a person to whom the emails were just going into a bucket thatll nobody ever saw. This aunt said to me, well, have you tried just googling it . She did a Google Search and she got a phone number. [laughter] could not believe it. I was so embarrassed. Here i am, former journalist you know, professor of journalism, the first thing my undergraduate deal, i did not do that. There it was. You did not just ask the google. I did not. [laughter] i was trying to be a model professor. So, we found it through that channel, that extended family member. I found the other person who is the genealogist and i met so, these were extended family members through elvis brother and they were able to tell me stories and absolutely the family had stories and remembered her and part of it was because she had married a chinese person. It was a really big deal for the family in 1903. So, yes. I got extremely lucky. That helps open up a whole section of the book, of the major character. I am just so grateful to everybody who helped out with that. Yes. That is wonderful. Is your sense that your uncle was a part of the extended family, as much as she was a part of your family . My sense of it is, he was a part of her family, but only, with limits. I know for certain that they did go to family events. But, it was so hard for them. It was difficult in those days. Interracial marriages were quite rare. It was a legal in many states out west and in the midwest. Luckily, for my family, it was not illegal in new york or connecticut where they got married. But i feel like my aunt was really warmly embraced in our family more so than my uncle was embraced by hers. Right. Yeah. It still speaks to, nonetheless when reading the book, the possibilities of mobility in terms of the interaction, the backandforth. Continuing to push back against the idea of chinese being simply in these enclaves and no one was interested in finding connections or pushing forth. We have not even gotten into the Chinese Equal Rights League. Really important part of chinese americ history, asianamerican history. Maybe that is a good place for us to end. You know, your uncovering of this really f amazing history tt your great grandfather and great uncle wereri all involved in in terms of really trying to push for and lobby for rights for chineseamericans during the height of exclusion. Yeah. I remember when i first learned about it. There was, a writer, okay, this goes back a little bit. There was a writer for the jewish newspaper who contacted me because i had written about uncle jack appeared in online asianamerican womens magazine. It was a personal essay about the family. He wasas like, did you realize that your family members had done such incredible Civic Engagement in chinatown in the period of time in which, you know, it was several decades into chinese exclusion and they were not able to vote so they were completely disenfranchised in terms of the political process. Did you realize this was going on. I said, no, i did not. I had heard of the Chinese Equal Rights League and the big component to it created the legal rights league. This was a league of merchants chinese. They were lobbying to stop the continuation of chinese exclusion on the books. They got together in new york and pennsylvania. Even in boston to gather documents, gatherr signatures, speaking out against exclusion in 1892 appeared i will let you read the book in order to find out what happened. I was incredibly moved by the work that they had done. I had later on you know found for documents and read more books. Where that writer from the newspaper ended up writing an entire book about the person that helped create, you know, the chinese exclusion. So, yes. There was all of that. I think this is a great place to into sort of remind all of us how much the chinese explored so many avenues, were politically engagedex in vocal and pushback against inclusion. Professor, i want to thank you for your time. Thank you for your book. This was really a pleasure to read and engage with. I wish you best of luck with it. If you are enjoying book tv use the qr code on the screen. A schedule of discussions book festivals and more. Book tv every sunday. Television for serious readers. This weekend brings you two days a book tv. Live saturday 9 00 a. M. Eastern. On sunday 2 00 p. M. Eastern at the Franklin D Roosevelt president ial library in hyde park new york. 9 00 p. M. Chairing his book about u. S. City starting in the 19