Everything I Learned from the Author of “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant”

Curtis Chin’s memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, has received multiple awards, including being An American Library Association Stonewall Honour Book, A 2024 Michigan Notable Book and was named A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. The memoir is a “love letter” to his “family and [their] restaurant, but also [his] hometown in Detroit” during the 1980s. It’s a crash course in American history, the rise of the AIDS epidemic and the experiences of a Chinese American family. Owing to the proliferation of crack cocaine, violence, and murder in his Chinatown community, and well aware of the risks of his sexuality, Chin was convinced that he would be dead by the age of 30. Yet, despite this potential for tragedy, what stuck with me after reading this memoir was the significance of joy and how, through tragedies, Chin learned to appreciate life and the people around him. Ultimately, what brings his family together is their restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where Chin was encouraged to talk to everyone. In doing so, he learned above all that people are inherently complicated. They are “good and they’re bad and sometimes it’s based off of your perception more so than reality”. This realisation has fostered his empathy for others and intrigue of people who were different from him, which became evident during our conversation.

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is beautifully crafted around the structure of a Chinese restaurant meal. It begins with “The Tea” and ends with “The Fortune Cookie”, covering lots of sensory experiences that immerse you in his family’s restaurant. It feels different to other memoirs that compile a person’s whole life; instead the end of the book is just the beginning. Chin is about to embark on his new life in New York, pursuing his dreams of being a writer and answers the parting words that his family would say to customers, “for here or to go?”

Jess: What made you want to write a memoir, and why now?

Chin: I was not planning to write a memoir. I write [for] TV and film as a day job, but I started writing this book because my family no longer lives in Detroit and when my siblings started having children, I thought it would be sad if they didn’t know anything about this history. And so I’ve stumbled upon it, in a sense. I’m not one of those people that grew up thinking: “oh, I’m going to write a book”. But that’s how life works sometimes, right? You just sort of go with what’s out there and it leads you in all these incredible directions.

Jess: How did you find the process of wanting to respect your family and their memories whilst also telling your truth?

Chin: I didn’t really think about those things. I just started writing and because I didn’t have a sense of publication as a goal; it gave me a lot of freedom. One of the things that people have said they like about my book is that I don’t present myself as this perfect kid, right? They liked the fact that I made mistakes and that I was willing to expose myself. I mean, in some ways, I should actually ask myself “was I worried about showing my own vulnerabilities and inconsistencies?”

Jess: I think that’s an interesting point because towards the end of the book, you can really see the change that you’ve experienced, especially when you go to university. 

Chin: Yeah. So, if anything, maybe I should have thought more about how I was presenting myself, but I didn’t really worry about writing about my youthful indiscretions because I figured that was such a long time ago. And if I can’t laugh at myself, then what is the point of writing the memoir? If I haven’t learnt and grown as a person, and if I can’t reflect back and see that that person in the book is a different person than me, then I have no business writing a memoir.

Jess: You detail how you learned to blend in, both in the restaurant and with the white majority in your school. How did you overcome this when deciding to write a memoir?

Chin: There’s this term that we use here in the United States called code-switching: the need to be able to switch your language and your personality based off the people you’re surrounded by. People see it as a burden that they have to always shift, but I see it as an opportunity – the skill of being able to blend in with different groups at different times, drawing upon different aspects. It just opens up more doors to communicate and hopefully that’s a two-way street, where the other people are also adjusting their expectations, their language and how they communicate with you, so that you can find a common language together. It’s almost like being bilingual.

I mean, the United States and the UK are both very diverse societies, right? With that comes a lot of opportunities, but also challenges. Racism, homophobia, gender discrimination, religious discrimination, those things will probably always be around because when you’re thrown into a situation where you’re meeting people from different backgrounds, you can’t expect to know everything about them. You’re going to get things wrong sometimes. But the question is, when you get these wrong, what is your response? Do you see this as an opening opportunity? Or as an opportunity to build further walls? For me, that’s a burden that I’m willing to accept. To live in a more multicultural society means that, yes, we’re going to bump heads, that’s inevitable. But hopefully we learn from these opportunities where we do have to bump heads.

Jess: As someone who has experience in journalism, poetry and is now an author, what role do you think the written word holds in today’s society?

Chin: For me, writing is about joy. It’s an escape from the craziness but, at the same time, I feel like I can articulate current issues within my writing to help people make sense of them. One of the things I spoke about in my book was that we live in a very divided country right now. But Chinese restaurants are one of the few places where you can go in and meet someone from a really different background than your own. And if you just take the time to have a conversation, maybe those are the small baby steps that we need to take as a country to move forward. And writing can capture these stories and these conversations – maybe that’s my role in terms of healing our country. These are very serious topics that we’re dealing with. We don’t want to brush them under the rug, but at the same time, we need to be able to talk about them in a way that actually brings us together and that fosters healing. I think that’s the problem, we used to talk about the United States as a country of immigrants, and we used to say what a wonderful thing that is, but there are people now who just demonise it, as if immigrants are the scourge of the nation. I feel like that’s where leaders can come in, we’re the ones that tell the stories. We’re the ones that humanise people.

Jess: What do you want people to take away from the book, and what kind of conversations do you hope it sparks?

Chin: I hope that people have fun reading my book. I hope you learn something. The kind of conversation I want is just the idea that we live in a very diverse world, right? I want people to pick up the book thinking that they’re learning about this Chinese American family, but in reality, they’re learning about people in general. They’re learning about America. Because sometimes when you read literature memoirs by people of colour or women or gay people, they’re sort of in their own little world and they’re not really connected to a broader narrative of what’s going on in the country. And I wanted readers who are unfamiliar with a Chinese American family to see themselves easily in the book, meaning that leap to connect to me as the author becomes easier. And so that was definitely a writing strategy of mine, in terms of trying to make my memoir as inclusive as possible.

[Interview has been edited for clarity].

Curtis Chin will be taking his book tour all the way to Oxford at the China Centre Tuesday 20 May 2025 at 15:00 at the Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre. I would encourage anyone to come along for an interesting and entertaining discussion about race, sexuality and politics but also the importance of community and compassion. 

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