MOTT STREET: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, by Ava ChinOld family stories are hard to revivify, even when they’re good family stories. This is the problem Ava Chin is up against in her sensitive, ambitious, well-reported, heavily peopled yet curiously remote memoir-cum-history, “Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.” It’s a book that has everything going for it except that intangible spark that crisp and confident storytelling throws off. The air is a bit still in this book, as if one is walking behind the docent on a long museum tour. Chin’s memoir takes its title from the narrow north-south road in Manhattan’s Chinatown that’s generally thought of as its Main Street, to which Chin’s family has a long and intricate and prosperous connection. When she’s on Mott Street, Chin feels she’s at home — except when she feels like an out-and-out alien (she can’t decide) because she and her mother were abandoned by her father and driven from the home place.

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