May-June 2025: Curtis Chin

Curtis Chin is a co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City and served as the non-profits’ first Executive Director. He went on to write comedy for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in twenty countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, was published by Little, Brown in Fall 2023. His essay in Bon Appetit was selected for Best Food Writing in America 2023 and his short doc, Dear Corky premiered on American Masters (PBS). He is currently working on a new docuseries on the history of Chinese restaurants in America.

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We're delighted that Curtis is joining us in Leeds on 27th May, to discuss his memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.

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 to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to 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 spiralling misfortunes; and where-between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savoury 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 co-founder 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-and perhaps even share something off the secret menu.

We're reprinting Curtis's essay from Bon Appetit, which was also selected for the Best American Food Writing in 2023. You can read it here.

Detroit’s Chinatown was filled with old single men.

Most of them worked in food service as waiters and cooks—grueling jobs but the best they could get with their limited English skills. After long days they would arrive at my family’s restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, and practically sprint down a rickety back flight of stairs to the gambling den below. From the top of the landing, I could hear them swearing in Cantonese while casting their well-worn dominoes and chipped mah-jongg tiles. Occasionally, the gamblers would come up for a pair of our made-from-scratch cabbage egg rolls. If they were winning big, they’d splurge on a jumbo shrimp cocktail.

To find out more, you can watch a clip from PBS here, where Curtis talks about what growing up in a Chinese restaurant taught him.

And there's an interesting interview in The Oxford Blue, following his recent visit to Oxford.