Curtis Chin grew up as much of a Detroit insider as you can be, as a member of a family who trace their origins in the city to the late 1800s. His clan for generations had run Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, a restaurant popular with both working-class neighborhood residents and city dignitaries. Yet as a queer and closeted Asian American growing up in Detroit’s darkest era, the 1980s — when his city was experiencing urban decay, racial polarization, sporadic street violence and persistent malaise — Chin felt very much the outsider.
A poet, filmmaker and veteran activist and organizer for Asian American and LGBTQ causes, Chin writes about his physical, political and sexual coming of age in those times with intimate candor in his new memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, to be released Oct. 17. A heartbreaking centerpiece of the book: Chin’s insider account of the Chinatown community’s experience of the brutal killing of Vincent Chin — beaten to death in 1982 by a pair of angry white autoworkers as he was celebrating his imminent wedding — and the miscarriage of justice that followed when the men were initially sentenced to probation and fined a mere $3,780 fine with no jail time for the crime. For Asian Americans nationwide, Vincent Chin’s murder eventually became a rallying cause, defining the political awakening of a generation. For young Curtis, it was that and more: Vincent’s and Curtis’ families were close, and Vincent was a regular presence at their restaurant.
