Curtis Chin is the author of the memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. (Little Brown). A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Chin served as the nonprofit’s first executive director. He has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has made two documentaries, Tested and Dear Corky, the latter of which premiered on “American Masters” on PBS.Chin and I zoomed about his memoir and about his formative years spent in Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, his family’s restaurant in Detroit. His detailed memories in Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant extend to experiences such as coming out during AIDS and recognizing firsthand the type of racial hate that led to the murder of Vincent Chin during the car-industry crisis in Detroit.
When we spoke, Chin had been on a nationwide book tour and had barely spent time at his home in Los Angeles. He is disarmingly frank and ebulliently generous with writing advice; he has an energetic air about him, despite all of the events he’s done for his book. The following interview had been edited for length and clarity.
ZYZZYVA: Are you still making tangy chicken?
Curtis Chin: No, but after this book I’ve become known as a food expert, an accidental food connoisseur.
Z: Are you a foodie?
Chin: No, not at all. I don’t know the top restaurants. I was in Chicago during the James Beard Award this past year. I happened to be there for another conference, and so I was invited to a couple of events there. And I was uncomfortable because the type of food I love is made by Mom and Dad—simple stuff. I would much rather go to a restaurant with great service and mediocre food than one with mediocre service and great food.
Z: Say more?
Chin: For me, the restaurant experience is not just about what you put in your mouth, but what comes out of your mouth. It’s the chat. It’s the banter. It’s the friendships that are formed. It’s those relationships. That’s what draws me and makes me proud to be a Chinese restaurant kid. I loved the food that we served, but I also love the connections that we made.
I’ve done two-hundred-and-fifty book events. One of the most memorable moments was when I was at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. This was a packed reading. At the end of it, this 60-year-old white woman gets up, and she’s like, has anybody here ever eaten at Chung’s? We’re in Massachusetts, and nobody has. But then she said, “I grew up in Detroit. That was my family’s favorite restaurant, we went there every Sunday.” Those were her happiest memories growing up. She told her mom that she was coming to this reading. Her mom has dementia now, but she started recounting all of our dishes in vivid detail. This woman said that for the first time in a long time, she felt like she had her mom back.
I always knew that my family was doing a great thing by serving this wonderful food. But, more importantly, my family was creating community in Detroit, something severely lacking in that period in that city’s history, when everything was burning down. We were a refuge for people to remember the good days of Detroit. We were, in some ways, a lifeboat to that past for the city to hold on, until that rescue boat came along. We held on as long as we could. It gives me so much pride that we were there for our customers. For 65 years under our ownership. And then the restaurant lasted another ten years under somebody else. I do sometimes think about going back; I wish I could go back and reopen it. I would love to.
I’ve also had people say to me that this book would be important for a gay Asian kid around there. Most of the people that come up to me are Asian teens. This has happened about a dozen times now, where at the end of the reading, they linger to be the last one to leave. When that happens, they want to talk about something important. They thank me for the book, but then they start talking about their own lives, and how difficult they are, and how much they’re fighting with their parents, and they’re struggling. A few times, they’ve even started breaking down and crying in front of me. I’ve had to reach out and hug them and try to give them support and say, look, this is a temporary situation when you’re fighting with your parents. Life will get better—and have compassion toward your parents who are maybe going through some things, too.
Z: Yes, your book is a story about family. And community.
Chin: Yes, it’s a family story, and that’s why, I think, the book has been so relatable. I have people who are Jewish and Polish who come up to me and say, Hey, that’s our family story, too. At the end of the day, it is about family, and how family comes together.
Z: Do you feel like you were channeling techniques from your writing courses when you wrote this? It’s beautifully written. There’s suspense. There are dramatic arcs.
Chin: I wrote this book as a poet. I paid attention to every single word. I paid attention to every image. I paid attention to rhythm. End rhymes, enjambment, every tool of a poet. I tried to pull into it some of my screenwriting experience, like scene and dialogue; I took a couple screenwriting classes at UCLA extension programs. I did writing groups, as part of the Asian American Writers Workshop, so I did get feedback from other people. But I never took a fiction writing class, and I never took a memoir writing class. I did take poetry-writing classes. I took a couple of playwriting classes/screenwriting classes. But I wrote the book like a poet, in the sense that I paid attention to every detail.
Z: When I was reading your book, I thought, This was 45 years ago, and he remembers it with such precision. There were moments where you were a little kid, and you were talking to your grandmother and eating a particular thing. Or you remembered that your mom gave you exactly two egg rolls in a red bag before college. How did you research and access such details to animate the memoir?
Chin: When you write Asian American books or about people of color, sometimes their stories are a sidecar to the larger narrative of America. I wanted to root this Asian American experience in Detroit history. People in Detroit could pick up the book and feel instantly connected to it. I mention the closing of Hudson’s department store or the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. Where research helped me was that I could easily read about the Detroit Tigers when they won the World Series, I found out what day it was. It was a Sunday, which reminded me, Oh, this is what the room was like on a Sunday. It instantly brought back memories. Or I could look up weather reports on particular days.
Z: You could not have been more frank in this book; it was emotional to witness the narrator experience firsts, like coming out and being first-gen at college. The narrative captures your world, but also hallmarks of the time, like the murder of Vincent Chin, the Eighties AIDS crisis—and it details how you absorbed those as an adolescent. There’s so much optimism in this book, despite many reasons to be dark. Do you feel like a lucky person?
Chin: I do feel very lucky. Something I didn’t mention in the book was that my mom always said I was lucky growing up. When we were playing mahjong, she often asked me to roll the dice for her because good things are always happening to me. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anybody’s.
Most of the time, I want to help. That comes from my mom always talking about how difficult her life was. I wanted to make things better for her—and I felt confident that I was someone able to do things. I wrote about this in an episode that’s not in the book. When I was three years old, we went to a Hudson’s to see Santa Claus. It was this big, crazy place, and everybody was running around. I got lost, and instead of crying like most kids would do, I calmly went up to an elf and said, “Hey, I’m lost. Can you help me find my family?” They put the loudspeaker on, and connected me with my family, and then we went back to the restaurant. Everybody kept praising me; that’s the earliest memory I have of being someone who was good in a crisis, not panicking. That set me on this notion like, Okay, I can be one of those stalwarts.
But then, my parents were in a terrible car accident, and my dad died. My mom was severely injured. My brother who lives in Los Altos Hills immediately whisked my mom off to the Bay Area to help her recuperate. By the end of that first week, all four of my other siblings decided they were also going to move out to the Bay Area to help take care of my mom. Do I go back to Hollywood, or do I stay in Detroit and take over this family restaurant?
All through that first week or two, I helped organize a funeral, I became the executor of the will. I’d established a scholarship for kids whose parents work in the food-service industry. My next book is called Leftovers and it’s about that period when I was in Detroit.
Z: Can you talk a bit about the docuseries you’re planning on Chinese restaurants?
Chin: For the paperback of my book, I’m doing twenty-four readings around the country, all at Chinese restaurants, and I decided to film that as part of an eight-part docuseries on the history of Chinese restaurants in America. The docuseries follows immigration history. There are eight episodes. The first episode will be the Exclusion Era, starting from the late 1840s to the 1940s, when the laws were finally repealed. That immigration pattern resulted in working-class, rural, Cantonese making chop suey, egg foo young, stuff like that. From before approximately 1940—maybe there’s a dozen to two dozen of those [restaurants] that are still around. The next era is the Tiki era.
Then in 1965, the Hart-Celler Act, the immigration law, [went into effect]. America had been in a space race with the Soviet Union, and so they changed the law to favor people with college degrees, and that changed the immigration pattern. You had a lot of people coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan, but those Taiwanese were not necessarily from Taiwan; they were originally from China. They brought Szechuan and Hunan food, as well as Taiwanese food, and [opened] a bunch of restaurants. When you look at globalization and you look at soft power, traditionally, America has always exported our fast-food places like KFC and McDonald’s and that created a lot of goodwill and a lot of strength for America. Now, you see a whole wave of Asian-owned restaurants coming to America, like Din Tai Fung, 85 C. Paris Baguette, all these places, and even the concept of boba. What does that say about the changing dynamics in this world, this global society?
[In the docuseries], we will cover some restaurants like those. It will run the gamut, because Chinese food is so diverse. The prism is understanding the Chinese immigration experience through the food that we serve.
Z: Can you tell me a bit about your publishing experience?
Chin: There are three advantages to publishing with a Big 5. One is the big advance, if you can get it. The second is the prestige, and the third is the distribution power. Every Barnes & Noble knows my book. You can earn more money on a book tour than with an advance. They usually have good distribution and connections. You might not get into every Barnes & Noble, but you’ll get into a good number of them.
Some things are out of your control—like timing. My book sold at an auction. It caught the tail end of the anti-Asian hate movement. During the movement, a lot of books won big awards because more attention than usual was paid to Asian Americans.
Z: Even works that weren’t groundbreaking won attention. Still, this year, two spectacular Asian American writers were finalists for the Pulitzer. It’s a long-awaited event. On top of that, there are many books, such as David Mas Masumoto’s Epilogue for a Peach, coming out every year from small presses.
Chin: I wanted a fun, accessible book, but one that surprises you in terms of how deep and smart it is. This is the way I pitched it to my agent: we live in a very divided world right now. Chinese restaurants are one of the few places where you can go in and see people from different races, classes, sexual orientations, or whatever. And if we take those opportunities to connect with each other while we’re there, maybe those are the baby steps that our country needs to heal.
Evelyn Chi’en is the Senior Books editor for Hyphen Magazine, the author of Weird English, and a co-editor of a collection of Chinese poetry.