BOSTON — When I sat down to talk to filmmaker, writer and activist Curtis Chin, it felt strangely like chatting with a friend I’d known for years. Maybe it was because I’d caught him in a familiar setting, where he’s most relaxed and himself: a Chinese restaurant. Here, he sat back comfortably and breathed easily, drumming his fingers over the colorful bilingual menu like a piano he’d played countless times.
Chin, 55, grew up in a Chinese restaurant in Detroit: His family’s eatery, Chung’s, kept its doors open for 60 years, until the flagship downtown location closed in 2000. Chung’s is the backbone of Chin’s recent memoir, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant,” which chronicles his experience growing up Chinese American as the third-born of six children in 1980s Detroit and coming to terms with being gay. Chin is no stranger to writing — he’s been writing for more than three decades. But this is his first book, and reading it — with its medley of cheesy jokes, candid reflections and Motown lyrics — mirrors what it feels like to chat with Chin: friendly, seemingly effortless, intimate.
We met for dim sum at Hei La Moon in Boston’s Chinatown, a palatial two-floor restaurant that, despite its majestic sprawl, feels as cozy as Chung’s did when Chin was growing up, he said. (Chin lives in Los Angeles; he was in Boston as part of a tour to promote his memoir.) Fluorescent geometric accents speckled the walls around us, lantern-shaped golden chandeliers hung from the ceiling, soothing Cantopop purred over the speakers. At lunchtime on a Monday, the restaurant was full, humming with chatter and punctuated by occasional hoots from a table of rowdy diners.
“The Kikkoman soy sauce bottle on the table, the chopsticks, the teacup, the Chinese dividers, all of it’s the same as Chung’s,” said Chin, who sipped chrysanthemum tea and ordered us a staple in his dim sum diet: chicken pan-fried noodles. “I’m very superstitious,” he said, explaining that he always orders noodles, which symbolize good luck and long life. (Indeed, he’s on the older side for a first-time book author. “I’ve had a long journey as a writer,” he said.)
That journey has included stints writing for television, publishing essays in outlets like Bon Appétit and making social-justice documentaries. In 1991, Chin co-founded the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) with three other writers in New York. The group’s goals are to build camaraderie among Asian American writers through regular community readings and other programming, to nurture its participants’ craft through fellowships and writing workshops, and to disseminate their work through a digital magazine. Although Chin and his co-founders have all stepped off the board, leaving the AAWW to a new crop of leaders, the organization is the largest it’s been since its founding more than three decades ago.
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Growing up, Chin thought he would work at Chung’s full time one day. “I thought that was gonna be my life: I would inherit the restaurant just like my dad, who inherited it from his dad, who inherited it from his dad,” he said, tearing into a glossy, sesame-dusted baked cha siu bao.
He caught the writing bug as a teenager. In 1982, after the racially motivated killing of a family friend, Chin, then 14, was stirred by the lack of news coverage of the event — and of Asian Americans broadly. He began punching out letters to the editors of local papers on his family’s typewriter and getting involved with the local Republican Party, which he saw as an avenue for making his voice heard. Eventually, spurred by the Republican response to the AIDS crisis, apartheid and abortion rights — issues that came to a head for Chin when he participated in Michigan Boys State, a high school summer program for aspiring politicians — he moved away from the party.
Chin’s refreshing honesty sets him apart from many memoirists: He’s unafraid to reveal the less glamorous or more shameful parts of his life — like his childhood resentment toward his truculent grandmother, Ngin-Ngin, even after she suffered a major stroke. A few moments he shares could even be worthy of cancellation by today’s standards, as when a teenage Chin intentionally misgendered a transgender woman after she made a racist comment about his family serving dog meat at Chung’s. Chin also illustrates his sexual frustration and experiences in detail, like a clandestine moment with a gay customer in the bathroom of his family’s restaurant.
“Having to write a memoir pulls you back and forces you to open wounds you thought you’ve moved on from,” Chin said. “I felt like I needed to be honest about things where I was the good guy and when I was the bad guy, because nobody’s perfect, right?”
Chin brings this sincerity into his work with the AAWW. One of his co-founders, the novelist Christina Chiu, said she noticed Chin’s “generosity and openness” from the start, when he first brought the group together. “With Curtis, everything is about cooperation: There was really no backstabbing or competition,” Chiu said.
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Part of the organization’s mission is to build community among Asian American writers, but Chin doesn’t do that with rose-colored glasses. Threading through his memoir is his uncertainty around what it means to be an ally, both to other queer people and to other people of color. At one point, he recalls himself and an Indian American friend at his university’s students-of-color orientation feeling unsure of how to respond when their Black peers mentioned being called a racist slur.
“You can’t jump up and be just as mad, because then people will look at you like, ‘You’re trying to take our space,’ and ‘Your outrage will never be as much as my outrage,’” he said. “And I don’t want it to be performative in that sense. I wanted to be supportive of the Black students who were facing this discrimination, but I didn’t want to overstep my bounds.”
Dynamics between Black and Asian people — sometimes friendly and other times fraught — also characterized his youth in Detroit, where Chin quickly recognized that he didn’t fit into the Black-White binary framing race relations. In the book, he recalls his family’s “unspoken kinship” with their Black neighbors in the majority-White suburb of Troy, where the family moved when he was in elementary school.
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But Chin also describes a Black co-worker who doubted his belonging in Detroit and spurned his efforts to forge solidarity between them. It prompted Chin to recognize that cross-racial solidarity is not always easy and to acknowledge his advantages in relation to working-class Black people in the city. It is a realization that sticks even today, with contemporary issues such as affirmative action and policing appearing to foment Black-Asian tensions.
Chin grappled with his identity as a gay man, too, and he details in his book how lost he felt compared with other students who proudly came out in college. He chose to wait to come out to his parents until he turned 26, partly because he wanted to first find a partner worthy of introducing to them, he said.
Chin ends the memoir at a point in time before he came out to his parents. “I came out to the most important person, which is myself,” he told me. “The book is really about equipping myself with all the tools necessary to live my life. And once I accepted that I was gay, that gave me the freedom to do it.”
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He’s built a strong community of supporters among his AAWW co-founders. In the ’90s, as they steered the organization forward and critiqued one another’s work, they also frequently bonded over Chin’s favorite activity: having a meal at a Chinese restaurant. They still occasionally do.
“Anytime he’s in town, we’re always there for the seven-dollar pork chops” at Taiwan Pork Chop House in New York’s Chinatown, co-founder Marie Myung-Ok Lee said. Chiu, Chin’s other co-founder, noted that Chin’s culinary tastes span well beyond Chinese cuisine: She recalled his penchant for fried tofu burgers and noted that the AAWW itself was born out of a meeting at a Greek diner.
That love of food — and a lifelong fondness for sharing it with others — underpins every aspect of Chin’s life, down to his work ethic. When he was growing up, Chung’s stayed open every day of the year except Thanksgiving, he said. That mind-set of always being on the clock has stayed with him. He joked that he has no work-life balance as a writer: “If you enjoy what you’re doing, do you really need to take a break from it?”
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In a parallel universe, where Chin had never become a writer and had instead taken over Chung’s, he would still probably work too much, he admitted. He might even consolidate his home and workplace into a single space, he said, a sort of middle-class reincarnation of the blue-collar Cantonese immigrants who shaped America’s first Chinatowns.
“If I had a dream, it would be to live above a Chinese restaurant,” Chin said, effortlessly balancing a rotund pork siu mai nest between two slender chopsticks and gesturing at the lunchtime bustle around us. “I could eat Chinese food all day.”
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
By Curtis Chin
Little, Brown. 291 pp. $30
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