Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant

An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

This “vivid, moving, funny, and heartfelt” memoir tells the story of Curtis Chin’s time growing up as a gay Chinese American kid in 1980s Detroit.

Nineteen-eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor and the local drag queens to a big-time Hollywood star and elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes; and where, between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions, he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself.

Served up by the cofounder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and structured around the very menu that graced the tables of Chung’s, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is both a memoir and an invitation to step inside one boy’s childhood oasis, scoot into a vinyl booth, and grow up with him.