Curtis Chin often jokes that when he introduces his book, the simplest promotional line is this: “Come for the egg roll, stay for the conversation about racism.” At first glance, it sounds like a lighthearted joke. In reality, it perfectly captures what his life, his memoir, and the remarkable story he shared during an American Community Media conversation celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month are all about. He talks about Chinese restaurants, but he is really talking about America. He talks about food, but he is really talking about identity. He talks about his family, but he is really telling the story of an entire country. Curtis Chin, a Chinese American writer, has discovered something important.
Curtis Chin was born nine months after the Detroit uprising of 1967. The rebellion was one of the bloodiest events of the civil rights era. Forty-three people were killed, more than a thousand were injured, and the National Guard occupied the city for days. Chin jokingly calls himself a “riot baby.” He says people often ask why he is so passionate about social justice. His answer is simple: had that uprising never happened, he probably would never have been born. That is why he feels a responsibility to talk about these issues.
At the center of the story is Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, the restaurant his family operated in downtown Detroit. The family’s story stretches back to the late nineteenth century. One of his great-grandfathers left Canton for America and first arrived in Canton, Ohio, because he mistakenly believed that Chinese people lived there. When he realized his mistake, he moved on to Detroit, where the automobile industry was beginning its rise. The family eventually settled there and built the restaurant that would become one of Detroit’s best-known Chinese establishments.
Over sixty-five years, Chung’s sold more than ten million handmade egg rolls. Yet it represented far more than food. The restaurant became a gathering place in a city simultaneously struggling with economic decline, crime, the crack epidemic, the AIDS crisis, and racial tensions. Chin recalls that by the age of eighteen he personally knew five people who had been murdered. Even so, he describes it as a wonderful place to grow up. He was raised in a restaurant where life constantly flowed between the kitchen and the dining room, where people from every walk of life passed through the doors, and where he learned something he believes America is beginning to forget: how to live alongside people who are different from one another.
The title of his memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, is no exaggeration. Chin says that is truly where he learned life’s most important lessons. One of the book’s recurring themes comes from a familiar question heard in Chinese restaurants everywhere: “For here or to go?” On the surface, it is a question about food. For Chin, however, it means much more. It was the same question his great-grandfather faced while standing in the port of Canton and deciding whether to leave his homeland behind. It was the question that followed generations of immigrants to America. It was also the question Chin himself wrestled with as he tried to define what it meant to be Chinese, American, a Detroiter, or simply himself.
Perhaps that is why the book has resonated with such a wide audience. The state of Michigan selected it for the Great Michigan Read program as one of the most important community reading projects in recent years. Chin has spoken about the book at more than 350 events across ten countries. He has appeared in Oxford, South Korea, American military bases, and small-town libraries. More than thirty of his book events have taken place in Chinese restaurants. He says that is because these places are not merely restaurants. They are community spaces.
One of the most important stories behind the book is the case of Vincent Chin. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American man who was beaten to death in Detroit in 1982 by autoworkers who mistakenly believed he was Japanese. During the crisis years of the American auto industry, many workers blamed Japanese car manufacturers for the loss of American jobs. Vincent Chin became the victim of that anger. Today, the case is widely regarded as the first modern anti-Asian American hate crime. For Curtis Chin, it is not a historical event found in a textbook. It is part of his childhood. It is part of the realization that in America, people can be attacked not only for what they have done but for what others imagine them to be.
According to Chin, the prejudices directed at Asian Americans have changed very little over the last 150 to 200 years. The actors and circumstances change, but the underlying assumption remains the same: many people still do not see Asians as fully American. That reality became especially visible during the COVID pandemic, when thousands of Asian Americans were subjected to harassment and attacks across the country.
Yet Chin believes the problem runs deeper than racism alone. In his view, growing economic inequality, political polarization, and the breakdown of community create an environment in which hatred can easily take root. As long as there are no policies that genuinely serve working people, there will always be those who exploit racial, religious, and cultural differences to divide them.
Chin did not originally plan to become a writer. His family wanted him to pursue a “real” profession because, in the minds of many immigrant parents, success meant becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Instead, Chin became a Hollywood screenwriter. He has often recalled that when he told his parents he wanted to be a writer, his mother asked a simple question: “How are you going to make a living?” The story perfectly reflects the immigrant experience that runs throughout his memoir: children trying to meet their families’ expectations while also finding their own voice.
Another fascinating dimension of his story is that Chin speaks openly about growing up as a gay man in a traditional Chinese family in 1980s Detroit. He says that as a child he tried to hide three things: that he was Chinese, that he was gay, and that he came from a poorer neighborhood than many of his classmates. Later he realized that those experiences gave him a unique ability to listen to and understand the stories of others. That insight feels especially relevant today, when conversations about identity often reduce people to a single label.
There is also a charming story connected to his PBS documentary Warren King: King of Cardboard, which tells the story of a Chinese American artist who creates extraordinary sculptures out of cardboard. Chin says he is drawn to such stories because Asian Americans are often viewed through stereotypes: good students, quiet, hardworking, predictable. Instead, he wants to show people who are quirky, creative, funny, flawed, and imaginative. In other words, human.
Perhaps his most beautiful observation is that Chinese restaurants may actually be among America’s most democratic institutions. In speeches, he often recalls how the customers at Chung’s included General Motors executives and factory workers, Black families and white families, Republicans and Democrats, police officers and people who were in conflict with the police. Everyone received the same menu. Everyone sat in the same room. Everyone paid for the same food. Social status disappeared inside the restaurant. Chin believes that idea has become almost revolutionary in modern America.
He also offers a simple but powerful lesson worth remembering: “What I learned in Chinese restaurants is that everyone has a story. You just have to take the time to listen.” That philosophy runs through all of his work.
During his international book tour, Chin noticed another interesting shift. When the memoir was first published in 2023, audiences abroad mostly asked about Chinese restaurants, Detroit, and the immigrant experience in America. More recently, however, the questions have changed. During a five-city tour in Canada, people were far more interested in what was happening to America itself. They were not asking about the restaurant. They were asking how the country had arrived at its current moment.
Chin does not answer as a political analyst. Instead, he tells stories. He talks about the people who sat together in his family’s restaurant. Workers, teachers, police officers, Black Americans, white Americans, immigrants, and longtime regulars. He reminds audiences that Chinese restaurants remain among the last public spaces in America where people from different backgrounds still encounter one another naturally.
He says it may sound overly simple, but the healing of a country often begins with an ordinary conversation. It begins when someone leans across a table and asks another person, “What are you eating?” A conversation follows. Curiosity grows. Understanding emerges.
At a time when America seems increasingly unable to listen to itself, Curtis Chin searches for hope in an unexpected place. Not in politics. Not on social media. Not on television. He finds it in Chinese restaurants. In the places where people still sit at the same table, look at the same menu, and occasionally strike up a conversation.
That is why he says, half joking and half serious, that Chinese restaurants may still save America. And after listening to his story, it does not seem impossible that he may be right.
