Curtis Chin realized that 'Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant'

Curtis Chin's exuberant, big-hearted memoir "Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant" illuminates both the author's life and overlooked aspects of Detroit history.

Chin's great-great-grandfather came to the U.S. from Guangzhou in the 1880s during the Oriental Exclusion Act era, when immigration was greatly restricted and it was illegal for people born in Asian countries to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Looking for opportunities, his great-great-grandpa opened a general store in Detroit, enabling him to sponsor his Chinese-born family to join him in the U.S.

Chin recounts irreverently, "According to my mom, [the next son to come] was the one who opened the gambling den beneath the family store and if the other rumors are true, made whiskey runs from Canada during Prohibition in the 1920s."

By 1940, the store became the restaurant, Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, in Detroit's oldest Chinatown. Soon, the extended family was pitching in, and by the time Chin was growing up in the 1980s, the family included his four brothers, sister, parents, grandparents "and the occasional cousin, second cousin and family of Vietnamese refugees who my dad took in."

Chin and his siblings are expected to help out, and Chin recounts often feeling "overlooked and overwhelmed" amidst the hustle and bustle. He notes drily, "The 1980s in Detroit were tumultuous times," an understatement if ever there was one.

It is hard work for the family to navigate crime, economic woes and the city's complex politics. Chin's personal journey also grows rocky as he realizes he's gay. The AIDS crisis was brutalizing the country then, and homophobia was rampant and legal.

In junior high, Chin develops crushes on the restaurant's many rotating cooks, for example Mr. Mah, a "cute twenty-something-year-old with thick hair and a glorious tan". Chin does his best to find opportunities to work alongside the handsome Mr. Mah, but also wishes he could quash his feelings: "I hoped that it was just a phase or that it might happen with girls too."

Poignantly, Chin describes his anxiety and attempts to "de-gay myself." He takes to wrapping a thick rubber band around his wrist, flicking it every time he sees a handsome male customer. "The sharp pinch was meant to connect gay thoughts with pain," he writes. "Instead, it piqued my interest in S and M."

For a time, Chin adopts a conservative persona, even declaring himself a Republican in high school, in an attempt to disconnect from his fear of rejection and sense of otherness.

When Chin goes off to college, he hopes for acceptance, but often finds himself misunderstood in the predominantly white classes at the University of Michigan. Still, as he comes into his own, he realizes what he needs to learn in navigating life, he'd already picked up from working in his crowded, tumultuous, but diverse and loving family's restaurant.

Chin is the co-founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker. Chin also is a fantastic storyteller and his scintillating debut will have readers laughing, crying and laughing some more.

May-lee Chai wrote story collections "Tomorrow in Shanghai" and "Useful Phrases for Immigrants," winner of an American Book Award, and is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant

By: Curtis Chin.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 304 pages, $30.

Event: Club Book (virtual), 7 p.m. Oct. 23, clubbook.org. Free.