'Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant': A coming-of-age and coming-out memoir

Curtis Chin offers a fresh perspective on the Asian American experience.

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For a while, every Asian American memoir felt the same: Our narrator, usually a woman, expresses much angst about a conflicted identity as the first American-born generation in a household of immigrants. There are scattered phrases and quotations in the parental language. There are long moments in front of mirrors, cataloging the differences between the narrator’s reflection and the cover models on magazines. And always, there is food: Mom’s dumplings, Grandma’s kimchi, Dad’s soup, Auntie’s chicken korma.

Curtis Chin’s new memoir, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant,” breaks this mold by describing an Asian American experience we’ve heard much less about. Though his mother immigrated from Hong Kong, on his father’s side he’s a fourth-generation Chinese American. He grew up in a part of the U.S. we don’t typically think of as home to Asian Americans: not the West Coast, not the East Coast, but the Midwest, specifically Detroit. And he’s gay, something he realizes about himself at a fairly young age and that shapes his perspective of the customers at his family’s restaurant.

Ah yes, the restaurant. The one Asian American memoir trope that Chin wholeheartedly embraces is the food, even structuring his book like a Chinese restaurant menu. But how could he not? Chung’s wasn’t just any Chinese restaurant. It was a Detroit institution, a go-to for three generations, and quite possibly the birthplace of a beloved local dish called almond boneless chicken. (Chin digs into the history and cultural significance of almond boneless chicken in a recent episode of “Proof,” a food podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.)

It’s at Chung’s where Chin learns about being part of a community as he watches his father greet and joke with customers, from onetime guests to regulars who include Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. It’s at Chung’s where he secretly studies customers from the nearby gay neighborhood, wondering if he’ll ever have the confidence to be out like them.

And it’s at Chung’s where he begins his love affair with writing, though it has a heartbreaking start. Detroit is marked on the map of Asian America as the place where Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, was fatally beaten in 1982, a few days before his wedding, by two white auto workers who thought he was Japanese and projected their economic frustrations onto him. Vincent Chin and Curtis Chin weren’t related, but their families knew one another: Curtis’ uncle was to be Vincent’s best man. Instead, he went to Vincent’s funeral.

The regulars at Chung’s included reporters who often left copies of their newspapers behind. For days after Vincent Chin’s killing, Curtis Chin scanned the papers and watched the local TV stations for news about what had happened. When no coverage appeared, he began writing letters to the editor. None of his missives were ever published. But he’d discovered the power of words. Those words carried him to the University of Michigan, where he studied creative writing and poetry, and to a career as a writer (he is a co-founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop), producer, director and activist.

“Everything I Learned” focuses on Chin’s coming-of-age, from middle school through college. Like a Chinese restaurant menu, it’s got a little of everything: sketches of family members, ruminations on race relations and sexual identity and urban decline, anecdotes about memorable employees and customers and classmates, and of course, Chin’s favorite dishes — best not to read this book on an empty stomach. On the Portland stop of his book tour (full disclosure: I was his conversation partner), Chin displayed a well-honed sense of humor, and that comes through in his memoir as well.

He’s promised a sequel. I do love having seconds.