Amplifying Asian Americans: Mott Street Girls
Mott Street Girls is a small business founded by Chinese Americans Anna Huang and Chloe Chan that offers walking tours and works to amplify the community of Manhattan’s Chinatown. In this piece, Anna and Chloe speak about becoming tour guides, uplifting local voices, and their roles as storytellers.
In this blog series, we highlight creative pursuits outside the music industry and by Asian American Pacific Islanders, as part of our mission in Amplifying Asian Americans, or #AAA.
MSG is a symbol of stigma against Chinese American food and the people who make it. Mott Street Girls, or MSG for short, are becoming a symbol of history reclaimed. Co-founded by Chinese Americans Anna Huang and Chloe Chan, MSG offers history and food tours of Manhattan Chinatown, but Anna and Chloe go beyond that in their mission to support local businesses and tell stories that have long gone untold.
Before Mott Street Girls existed, I met Anna and Chloe when they became volunteer tour guides at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). I trained them to lead the Museum gallery tour, which covered the Chinese American journey from the Opium Wars, through the Chinese Exclusion Act, and all the way until 9/11. The tour script was at least 10 pages long, the gallery filled with more information than one could possibly read in an entire weekend, but Anna and Chloe devoured it all. They hadn’t met before, but because they both came for training every Thursday night, they became quick friends, and they finally “graduated” from the program after testing their tours back to back. They seem to have remained back to back ever since.
Anna, me, and Chloe at Yu and Me Books, April 2022.
“We missed those Thursday nights leading tours,” said Chloe when I interviewed them this April, “and we had some free time in the pandemic, so we thought, why not lead tours ourselves?” MOCA closed its doors to visitors in January 2020, before the pandemic hit most New York businesses, due to a fire at their collections site. As the pandemic slowly spread across the United States, it hit Chinatowns harder than anywhere, and Asian Americans suffered from widespread hate and violent attacks because of it. Anna and Chloe saw an opportunity to bring joy and celebration back to Chinatown, so they studied for their tour guide licenses, wrote a new script, put their picture on AirBnB Experiences, and led their first tour of the neighborhood in October 2020.
They always intended MSG to be a side project. Anna and Chloe both work full time and sacrifice their weekends to lead the tours. They also intended social media to be used just promotionally, but the community had bigger plans for them. Welcome to Chinatown, a local nonprofit, reached out directly to Anna and Chloe to ask them to write and lead a series of walking tours through the summer of 2021 that would take guests “Beyond the Storefronts,” in support of the small businesses that had received grants from the organization’s Longevity Fund. It was a massive project for Anna and Chloe to take on, but they approached it as they had the tour training at MOCA: with their whole hearts.
“It’s important to share this part of history that is not taught in school. It reminds people that the fight for equality starts with solidarity.”
Things took off quickly from there. Soon, MSG was featured on The Today Show, and they gained thousands of Instagram followers overnight. Anna and Chloe stayed committed to the community through it all, and recognized how the community supported them back. The same day The Today Show crew came to film her tour, Chloe’s friends from Run for Chinatown (another organization that the Mott Street Girls have supported since its inception, participating in group runs to raise money for Chinatown) booked spots on the tour under an anonymous name. They showed up that morning holding signs with Anna and Chloe’s faces on them, thrilled for their friends and the positive press given to the neighborhood. This was a turning point for Anna and Chloe. They realized they needed a website and a team, and they needed to use their growth for good.
Now, Anna and Chloe focus their tours and social media on the needs of the Chinatown community. “Every week, the tour is a little bit different,” said Chloe. “For example, after Christina Yuna Lee was killed, we visited the altar that the community members made for her.” Chinatown was hit hard during the pandemic, but what Chloe and Anna teach their guests is that this is nothing new. I shadowed Chloe’s history tour this past Easter, the first time I had seen her lead one since MOCA. She covered much of the history the Museum had taught her, but she also shared the stories of the local businesses that have found new ways to survive under harsh conditions and the lanterns made by Send Chinatown Love, Think!Chinatown, and New York Chinese Cultural Center. She routed the tour past the art created by the Chinatown Mural Project and ended it in Columbus Park in front of the Chinatown Yarn Circle and directly facing The Tombs.
Images taken by Hailey Savage on a Mott Street Girls “Relive Life Under the Chinese Exclusion Act” tour led by Chloe Chan, April 2022.
“We are cultural ambassadors and historians of our community”
“Recently, we’ve started talking about the Chinatown mega jail because people have been noticing the graffiti and posters,” Chloe told me. The world’s tallest jail is set to be built in Chinatown, one of the replacements for closing Rikers Island, and the community–which very much includes Mott Street Girls–is fighting back. The outrage and protest comes as no surprise to those who know the history of Asian Americans and ways that Chinatown has been repeatedly stepped on or forgotten; the problem is that so many do not know this history at all. When I asked Anna what her favorite tour experience was, she recalled the time a Black woman joined and said that she hadn’t expected to be so moved by the history and culture of a people. “Oftentimes the struggle for Black liberation is seen as a unique piece of the American story,” said the guest. “In actuality, the struggle of minorities in this country is a shared one.” And as Anna put it when I spoke with her, “It’s important to share this part of history that is not taught in school. It reminds people that the fight for equality starts with solidarity.”
Mott Street Girls have generously provided discounts to their walking tours for all who attend the Show Yourself 5/16 show. In-person tickets are sold out but livestream tickets have been restocked and are available here.
After I shadowed Chloe’s tour, she and I met up with Anna at Yu and Me Books, a bookstore and coffee shop recently opened by Lucy Yu. Lucy and her store have become a beacon of light in the community. It is the first bookstore to specifically showcase Asian American authors, but perhaps its greatest value is providing a safe, warm space for locals to spend their time. I chatted with Anna and Lucy for at least an hour, swapping stories about our respective small businesses and thinking about how we could all uplift each other. We have Mott Street Girls to thank, for example, for being one of our sponsors at an upcoming concert in the Show Yourself Residency. Their generosity and collaborative spirit are two of the qualities I have always admired in Anna and Chloe, who have never seen a need to compete against other projects with similar goals.
The other quality I love about them is that they are not just tour guides. They are storytellers. “We are cultural ambassadors and historians of our community,” said Chloe, “I hope that through my tours, my guests can link the past with the present and develop a stronger connection with the Chinatown community.” When I toured with Chloe, it was difficult to walk one block without running into someone who knew her and wanted to say hello. It was also difficult to pass a business whose story MSG has not yet shared. The Mott Street Girls have themselves become a symbol of Chinatown, one without stigma and built on stories that are finally being told.
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