Curtis Chin was born nine months after the 1967 Detroit riot.
The rebellion was the deadliest of that summer’s nationwide racial unrest, leaving 43 dead, over 1,100 injured and the city under National Guard occupation for five days.
Chin, who refers to himself as a “riot baby,” explained his commitment to social justice advocacy in a witty, lively conversation May 22 with American Community Media. “People always ask me why I talk about social justice so much,” he said at the news briefing. “Without that incident, I probably wouldn’t be around, so I have to do it.”
That conviction also led to his memoir, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.”
’For here or to go?’
Published by Little, Brown and Company in 2023, the memoir traces Chin’s childhood working in his family’s restaurant in inner-city Detroit — a business founded by a great-great-grandfather who moved from Canton, China to Canton, Ohio in the late 1800s before realizing there were no Chinese people there. He eventually landed in Detroit just as the auto industry was taking off.
Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where Chin grew up, served over 10 million handmade egg rolls over 65 years.
It was a great place to grow up, he said — even amid the crack cocaine epidemic, the AIDS epidemic and a city socioeconomically convulsing as its auto industry declined.
“I personally knew five people murdered by the time I was 18 years old, but despite that, we had this fabulous Chinese restaurant in the inner city where my parents were able to raise me and my five siblings,” he said. The memoir is a thank-you to his parents and a “hat tip to my hometown of Detroit.”
”I think a lot of people still kind of misunderstand the city of Detroit. I wanted to show that Detroit was still capable of producing good things like me.”
Chin is the co-founder of the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. His latest film for PBS, “Warren King: King of Cardboard,” premieres this month.
Lucky 888
The book is structured around three sets of eight stories each — grade school, high school and college — because, as Chin noted, “for a lot of Chinese people, 888 is good luck.” His memoir’s central question is also culturally animated: “For here or to go?”
Chin’s great-great-grandfather faced the same question in the late 1800s as he stood cold and alone on a rickety dock in Guangzhou, China, trying to decide his future and that of his young impoverished family.
“As I got older, it was a question I asked myself, starting in our restaurant’s long and open back kitchen, where my family made some of our most popular items, including the tangiest barbecue pork and the best-smelling almond cookies.”
That question has found an international audience.
The memoir is currently the Great Michigan Read, a statewide program that selects one book every two years and distributes thousands of free copies to schools and libraries. Chin has also completed over 350 in-person events across 10 countries, from Oxford University to Camp Humphreys in South Korea, the largest U.S. overseas military base.
He has also done more than 30 events inside Chinese restaurants, using them as forums to discuss the state of these businesses and the issue of successorship: “The second generation doesn’t want to take over,” he said.
Hate crimes
On the current political climate, Chin argued that the stereotypes Asian Americans face have changed little in the 150 to 200 years that the community has been in this country. Chin lived in Detroit in 1981, as the Asian American community grappled with the first recorded hate crime, the murder of Vincent Chin.
The young auto worker was killed on the night of his bachelor party by two men who believed the Japanese auto industry was stealing their jobs.
Most recently, the community faced a shooting spree at two massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia, which left 8 people dead. And on May 18, two teenagers indoctrinated online in Islamophobia, entered the San Diego Islamic Center, killing three people before killing themselves.
Chin connected the rise in white supremacist violence to widening economic inequality and the political utility of racial division: “Until we have a political party that’s truly working for the working class, regardless of whatever their race, religion, sexual orientation is, we are going to continue to see these people exploit these divisions.”
He also described the concrete toll the current political climate has taken on his own work. The Michigan Humanities Council, which runs the Great Michigan Read, lost 90% of its funding after federal cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, reducing the state program’s book order from 10,000 copies to 3,500.
‘Building Bridges’
A corporate funder for a six-part documentary on Chinese restaurants in America that Chin was helping fundraise pulled out when the council’s diversity budget was eliminated, he added.
His international tour, he said, has generated a different tenor under the current administration than it did when the book launched in October 2023.
A recent five-city Canadian tour, which he branded the ‘Building Bridges’ tour as a pointed reference to a U.S.-Canada bridge project Trump has sought to block, drew audiences less interested in Chinese restaurants than a more urgent question: “What the hell’s going on?”
He described pitching the book to his agent as: “Come for the egg rolls, stay for the talk on racism.” Chin characterizes Chinese restaurants as among the few remaining public spaces “where you can go and see people from a different race or religion or socioeconomic background or religion.”
“If we could just take that opportunity to just lean across the table and ask the person next to you, ‘Hey, what are you eating?’ It’s these small conversations that I think our country needs to start having with each other, the small talk to bring us back together again,” he added. “This is what I hope that Chinese restaurants can do.”
“In some ways I like to think that Chinese restaurants are going to save America.”
