by Melissa Goodnight
October 17, 2023
Melissa Goodnight's work has appeared in Moon City Review, Mud Season Review, and Litro, among others. Melissa earned a BA from Missouri State University, an MA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and an MFA from Mississippi University for Women. She lives in Atlanta.
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin; Little, Brown; 304 pages; $30.00.
In filmmaker Curtis Chin’s first book, a coming-of-age memoir set in 1980s Detroit, readers watch the author’s childhood unfold through the window of his family’s popular Chinese restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine. Chin weaves family lore with hometown history, expertly working his way through time and place to create a snapshot of a life growing up both a gay man and an American-born Chinese, or ABC, around one of Detroit’s toughest neighborhoods. With astute observation and unflinching self-reflection Chin invites readers into his turbulent childhood, brimming with hospitality and opportunity, ultimately filling literary hearts to the brim.
There is much to admire in Chin’s memoir, including the way he layers subtle and not-so-subtle technique. Chin writes in linear time, starting with his earliest childhood memories and moving through college. But rather than chapters, he takes his readers, or “Diners” as he addresses them in the foreword, Note to Diners, through the likes of a Chinese restaurant menu with sections titled, “The Menu,” “Appetizers and Soups,” “Main Entrees,” and “The Fortune Cookie.” In doing so, Chin succeeds in welcoming readers into a familiar place (who hasn’t cozied up with a bowl of wonton Soup in a Chinese restaurant?) and transports them into Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where he proceeds to pull back the curtain allowing an almost-voyeuristic view of his life, one that is often both painful and poignant, but always mesmerizing.
By structuring his memoir as a menu, Chin is able to maintain a cohesiveness that can be lost when telling stories in an episodic way. But here, the structure only adds to the book’s burgeoning tightness and control, and once seated at Chin’s proverbial table, readers are served a layering of bite-sized memories, from sneaking cookies from his grandmother’s baking trays, to his eye-opening first encounters with gay men. The writing is snappy, often sarcastic, teetering on self-deprecation, but never fully giving into the temptation. This voice is assuring, comfortable, it comes natural to Chin, and it’s an easy one for readers to fall into. It’s as if Chin is standing at your table crafting a new recipe right in front of you, layer by layer, each ingredient heightening the dining experience.
In “Appetizers and Soups,” Chin presents his diners a chaotic childhood in the bustling streets of the Cass Corridor, one of Detroit’s most notorious neighborhoods where robbery, murder, and arson are a daily occurrence. Chin never shies from the turbulence and he speaks openly of the violence and racism he encountered, cementing “The Corridor” as both the center of his world, and the hostile, yet oddly hospitable epicenter of his readers’.
Chin manages to balance the darkness surrounding his homebase with welcome humor, often relying on his most colorful childhood memories to add levity, while also working to elevate the tension that is boiling underneath. In one such story, Chin and his brother Craig go on a “smut run” to sneak a peek at glossy magazines of naked women. A few days later, at the neighborhood pet store, Chin finds himself face-to-face with an International Male catalog. He isn’t sure what to make of the scantily-clad men on the cover, but he does make a split-second decision to stuff the catalog down his pants and run. Over the next several days, he peruses the pages in secret, guilt and excitement growing inside him. It isn’t until the attractive owner of the pet shop visits Chung’s for dinner, that Chin understands what’s happening.
“I suddenly realized what Craig saw in those spreads from Playboy and Penthouse. It was a physical attraction of pure joy and lust, a carnal knowledge…I was scared that our guests might discover my secret—my sexual attraction to other boys and men—and my survival instincts kicked in, so I did the only reasonable thing I could do; I fled to our lobby and slipped the catalog into our lost and found.”
The adept ways Chin navigates these moments make them sometimes painful to read, but they are important in allowing readers to fully see inside his mind, feel what’s in his heart, while they watch him struggle with his sexuality, his tangled family, his complex community, these moments offer hope in his otherwise bleak world.
Ridding himself of the catalog would be one of many attempts Chin makes to mask his queerness for fear that he will one day disappoint his family, particularly his mother, a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong. A favored storyteller of family lore and a fervent supporter of her children, his mother often pushes Chin and his siblings to pursue excellence. This creates a rift between them in his teen years, but eventually subsides when he discovers how central her love is. Like The Corridor, Chin’s mother is his constant.
In spite of his mother’s steadfast love and protection, Chin, and now his readers, still have to reconcile the trauma happening outside the walls of the restaurant. So Chin does what he does best, he revisits those vivid, albeit agonizing memories with his trademark honesty. But this time, Chin is comfortable zeroing in on the larger social implications of these traumas, reminding readers and to some degree himself, that stepping out of difficult feelings and directly into truth and compassion can begin the healing process. Healing is what Chin is after, and it’s what his readers are after too.
One of these memories comes when Chin recounts how Bruce Lee rose to popularity in his childhood, a fact that both positively and negatively impacted him. He was first hopeful to see a man he could relate to on the big screen, but he is quickly pushed into a world of harsh racism, where he is routinely called, “Bruce Lee” by his white classmates or asked by strangers to do karate tricks. This heightens the racial divide he can already sense as a child, particularly in the predominantly white, suburban neighborhood the family lives in order to escape the violence of The Corridor. In high school he joins clubs and activities to combat the loneliness, but to no avail. When the racism doesn’t end in college, Chin is left with an oppressive feeling of otherness, and after years of stewing inside of him, questions begin to arise regarding the people and places that he loves.
Chin’s unflinching self-reflection reaches a fever pitch when, on a weekend trip home from college, the violence in The Corridor finally bursts the protective bubble the family’s restaurant enjoyed for decades. He finds a large picture window has been busted out and patched with plywood by his father. He’s angered and scared by his parents lack of urgency and he pushes them to leave The Corridor like many of the other Chinese families. When his parents refuse, Chin is left to reconcile his feelings regarding his past, present, and future.
In this moment, readers will empathize with Chin as a frightened young man torn by community violence and duty to family, but they should also recognize that Chin’s life is one of privilege as well as prejudice. His parents’ sacrifices have allowed him the time and space to work through his internal struggles, while affording him academic opportunities, money to travel, and the courage to explore. Most importantly, Chin, knowing that his family and the place he loves will always be there, is afforded the choice to leave, an opportunity most of The Corridor’s residents never get—a fact that goes largely unexplored in the pages of this book—instead Chin focuses on how he can use his life to help the wider world. Ultimately, using his ability as a storyteller to shed light on the very real injustices that people face every day, that we might learn for ourselves the tragic ways they can devastate a family, a community, and a person, that is Chin’s true talent.
In the end, Chin wrestles with the same question diners are asked as they enter the carefully-crafted dining room of Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine: “Is that for here or to go?” It’s a question he ponders throughout the book as he grapples with the people and the places he deeply loves. It also forces his readers to ask themselves the same question, to examine their own lives and the positions they hold within these different spheres, ultimately forcing them to gauge their own sense of otherness, even just for a moment.
In Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, readers are fed a hearty plate of mesmerizing honesty through Chin’s dutiful commitment to his truth. And while there is sadness, violence, and unrest in Chin’s story, it is a good, well-written book, with an intimacy, an optimism, and a quiet courage that does more than share just one man’s journey to self-discovery, it bears witness to a family and a community that is both timely and comforting; like a piping-hot dish of homecooked food.
©2023 Iron Oak Editions, LLC
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
For Here or To Go: A Candid Exploration of Family, Community, and Self in Curtis Chin’s Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
NONFICTION REVIEW
Image by Khachik Simonian from Unsplash
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
