Most parents tell their children not to talk to strangers, but writer and filmmaker Curtis Chin’s parents gave him the opposite advice.
Chin’s parents owned Cass Corridor’s famed Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine in the 1980s until it closed in 2000, and there was a never-ending supply of intriguing characters for the young American-born Chinese boy to interact with. Drag queens, drug dealers, and Detroit’s first Black mayor Coleman Young were all enticed by Chung’s’ pagoda-style awnings. Plus, as many Detroiters will tell you, Chung’s had the best almond boneless chicken and egg rolls in the city.
Readers relive the story of Chung’s in Chin’s memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, due out on Oct. 17. It’s been named one of Time’s most anticipated books for the fall of 2023. In the book, Chin talks about the array of customers who visited the restaurant, seminal moments in Detroit’s history, and even what it means to be a Detroiter. In all that he learned watching his parents run the restaurant, however, the most important lesson was treating people with respect.
“I don’t think I ever saw my parents acting differently, based off the customer, who they were, or how they were perceived on a race, class, or even a queer spectrum,” Chin tells Metro Times. “It was more like how you treated my parents when you came in… definitely with my dad, everybody that walked into the door was a potential friend for him.”
Chung’s former building at 3175 Cass Ave. sat vacant for two decades before being sold earlier this year. The new owners plan to open an Asian-inspired restaurant in its place, which leaves Chin with mixed feelings.
“Part of me was a little sad that it wouldn’t be Chung's that would be reopening in that place,” he says. “But part of me was happy that somebody would be taking over and hopefully they would have the same success that our family had.”
“My hope is that if you pick up the book, you think you’re just learning about this Chinese-American family growing up in the Corridor, but you’re really learning about Detroit.”
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In the 1980s, the neighborhood was a bustling Chinatown and gayborhood that helped Chin understand both the world around him and himself. Everyone knew they were welcome at Chung’s. The former mayor was a regular, so Chin and his family got used to seeing him. But when Academy Award-winning Russian actor Yul Brynner hosted a private party there, Chin remembers his father’s face lighting up.
“My dad was really excited because he’d always thought that people looked down on Chinese food,” he says. “So the fact that this Hollywood celebrity wanted to have his private party — he could have gone to Joe Muer’s or London Chophouse, or any of these other fancy, places, but no, he wanted to do it at our restaurant — that made my dad feel really good. Oftentimes, I remember customers based off of how it made my parents feel.”
Detroit’s former Chinatown has all but faded over the last few decades except for the Peterboro, a Chinese fusion restaurant that opened in the neighborhood in 2016. A 140-year-old building at 3143 Cass Ave. that housed the Chinese Merchants Association in the 1960s was also demolished for a parking lot earlier this summer, despite pleas from Detroit’s Asian American community and historical preservationists.
The book is not just an ode to Chung’s, but a picture of a bygone Detroit, for better or for worse. Readers see Chin’s memories of Hudsons’s Department Store in downtown Detroit (which is now being turned into Dan Gilbert’s multipurpose Hudson’s site tower) and the Devil’s Night arsons in full swing.
“It was that time period of being in Detroit and seeing Detroit in, some might say, the worst of it,” Chin remembers. “In the ’80s you did have Devil’s Night and the city literally burning down, and the crime rate was probably worse in the ’80s than it is now. There was crack that was just coming up and AIDs that was just coming up. There were all these new things to kill you.”
And yet, Chung’s was a sort of container. Despite the city’s volatile state, when you walked through those doors, nothing else seemed to matter. Chin doesn’t shy away from talking about the negative things happening in Detroit when he grew up, but says “Hopefully, it’s done in a loving way so that people can see that, yes, we had some terrible times in Detroit, but it was still a loving, great city to grow up in.”
Chin, who now lives in Los Angeles, had already left Detroit when his dad called to tell him he was closing the restaurant. He was shocked by the news, as Chung’s had been in his family since the 1940s, and he couldn’t fathom not being able to go there. He says the restaurant was still financially viable, but the cost of repairs was weighing on his dad’s shoulders. Chung’s closing felt abrupt.
“I was picturing always being able to go home to Detroit and go to the restaurant,” he says with a sadness and twinge of anger seeming to grow in his voice. “After I wrapped my head around it, I said to my dad you really should have a giant send-off because you've had decades of customers that would probably want to come back for a last meal or at least to say thank you, or goodbye. But my dad just didn't want to do that. He closed within a week.”
Chin continues, “I feel like maybe he was embarrassed that he had maybe let the family down because the business had closed underneath his watch. But I was saying to him, like mad, ‘I will come help you with this. Just keep open for a couple of weeks longer. We'll do a giant press release. We will have a giant celebration. Let’s just make it a party and thank the city and all of our customers.’ But he just didn't have the heart for it and that sort of broke my heart in some ways.”
Everything I Learned… also serves as an inspection of what it means to be a Detroiter and who gets to claim the city. Chin’s family technically lived in Troy, but they spent the majority of their time in Detroit at the restaurant.
Chin still claims Detroit as his home, though not everyone considers him a “real Detroiter.” Once a skeptical woman at the University of Michigan challenged Chin’s assertion that he was from Detroit by asking what high school he went to. Of course, he didn’t lie and admitted that he went to Troy High School.
“And she's like, you’re not from Detroit,” he remembers. “But we went there almost every day. So is being from Detroit where you slept or where you lived? Because I spent more waking hours in Detroit. I know the streets of Detroit better than I do the streets of Troy. But to me, I don’t know if I have the liberty or not to say I’m from Detroit. I mean, technically I am, because I was born there in the hospital,” he laughs.
He had a similar confrontation recently at The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists’ 2023 National Convention in Philadelphia. Chin doesn’t take offense to people calling out the fact that his family lived in Troy, but he claims the city because that’s where his heart is.
“I also understand that there is this idea that yes, it is quite different living below or above Eight Mile,” he says. “But as I say in the book, we’re one of those few families that actually traverse that because most people don't go one way or the other. But if you had to ask me as a kid which library did I go to more, I went to the Detroit Public Library.”
“Is being from Detroit where you slept or where you lived? Because I spent more waking hours in Detroit. I know the streets of Detroit better than I do the streets of Troy.”
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He adds, “My parents even like, sent us to Burton [International Academy] for a little while, because they lied and said that we lived in Chinatown. It was easier for me to go to school there because they could just drop us off before work. So, yeah, there are weird little things that put this little asterisk about whether or not I actually am from Detroit or not, but I like to claim it. I feel like that’s where my heart is. That’s where my identity is. My most vivid memories of my childhood are all from below Eight Mile.”
Chin initially started writing the book as a way to tell his family’s history for younger generations who didn’t have a connection to Detroit since the family moved to California after his father died. As he began writing, however, the focus soon became telling Detroit’s story rather than his own.
“I actually did write the book for the city of Detroit in general,” he says. “I feel like it's a love letter to the city because so many of the things that happened in the ’80s that really define the city, but also America, I really tried to weave them into my story. My hope is that if you pick up the book, you think you’re just learning about this Chinese-American family growing up in the Corridor, but you’re really learning about Detroit.”
When we ask whether Chin would ever consider returning to Detroit to reopen Chung’s, he says he hadn’t ruled it out completely.
“With my book coming out and some of these other writing projects I have out here in Hollywood, it just doesn’t seem like the right time,” he says. “Would it ever happen? I wouldn't close the door on it because I just know that beyond all of our customers that would love for me to reopen the place, I myself would love to reopen it. I just always thought it was a great place and I love what the restaurant stood for, not just for my family but for the city of Detroit.”
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant aims to offer a cross-cultural connection so that people from different walks of life can come together in unity, much like they did at Chung’s.
Share space and laughter with people who don’t look like you. Spend a few extra seconds getting to know someone for who they truly are outside of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. And as Chin’s parents told him, talk to strangers.
“Who they were talking about were the people in our dining room,” Chin says about his parents’ advice, which sticks with him to this day. “My mom didn’t graduate high school, my dad went to community college for maybe two semesters — they didn’t know what life was like outside of those four walls because they worked all the time. But they knew there was this dining room full of people that had access to these other opportunities and other lives. They wanted me and my siblings to know that we could live those lives too.”
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