Everything I learned, I learned in a Chinese Restaurant, by Curtis Chin

[Ulysses]

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
By Curtis Chin
Published by Little, Brown/Hachette, 2023
Five stars

I am always envious of a memoir by a gay man who is not a celebrity that got picked up by a mainstream publisher. That envy is always exceeded by my personal conviction that the journeys of gay men of the post-Stonewall years are hugely important, both for us to write and for us to read.

Curtis Chin’s story is doubly important, because it documents a coming-out journey that is both familiar and alien to each of us reading it; and because it comes from the perspective of a native-born Chinese American. The bonus here is that Chung’s, the Chinese restaurant in which the author grew up in Detroit, was a famous place and indeed lasted for many decades and was a downtown landmark. It is not some romantic myth; it was real and it touched huge numbers of Detroiters’ lives.

At the center of Curtis Chin’s memoir is the notion of family first. The restaurant that frames Chin’s entire life up through college is filled with three generations of the Chin family—which makes it both a place of safety (and good food), as well as a kind of a familiar prison from which the author and his siblings all want to escape. We learn a lot about Chin’s family saga, and it’s no surprise that this is a story filled with loss, sacrifice, and racial prejudice. Of course, every gay man’s story is framed by his family, but this sprawling clan, made up of immigrants and American-born men and women, is evocative of so much of our 20th century history as a nation.

Chin’s memoir is also filled with humor, and with the author’s wry self-deprecation. Growing up gay in America in the 1970s and 80s was no picnic, I can tell you from personal experience. Growing up gay and Chinese adds a whole new dimension to that story; while placing Chin’s saga in Detroit and its suburbs captures that particular seismic shift in the USA’s image of itself.

What struck me particularly was that the choices Curtis Chin makes in his life are not much different (whether wise or stupid choices) from those that any of us make. Although he is a half-generation younger than I am, the trauma of coming out was not much different. Fear of loss of family, fear of the entire culture around you, and a yearning to find a tribe, a crew, a friend group who were like you, are what drives us—even as we grapple with the same notions of working hard and trying to do your best (to make your family happy).

The end result is that, as I finished this memoir, with Curtis Chin heading off to a (temporary) new life in New York, I was moved to tears. As dramatically different as Chin’s life is from my own, it resonates again and again. That fact that my husband and I adopted a Chinese-born infant nearly thirty years ago only intensifies those feelings for me.

I wish I could go to Chung’s myself and taste first-hand what Curtis Chin describes.