In 1992, he joined Christina Chiu, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Bino A. Realuyo in co-founding the national literary nonprofit Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) in New York. He was in his early 20s at the time, writing poetry, a path that he describes finding in his memoir.
“Poetry saved me,” Chin writes of his college discovery. “Through stanzas and couplets, I pushed myself to explore what it meant to grow up in my family’s restaurant and on the streets of Detroit, to be a middle child in a crazy Chinese family who struggled to be heard, to understand what it was to be Asian American and working class.”
In the end, three decades later, memoir became the form of writing that allowed Chin to cover all this ground and more in the pages of his own book.
“Out of those originals,” Chin says, referring to his AAWW co-founders, “I’m the last to publish a book. It’s a bit of a homecoming.”
Ten years ago, when he began writing the manuscript that would become “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant,” he wasn’t intending to seek out publication. Films, like “Vincent Who?”, his documentary on Asian American activism after the 1982 murder of Chinese-American Detroiter Vincent Chin, were his medium of choice.
“After my dad passed away, everybody had left Michigan, and when my siblings started having kids, I started thinking that these kids would never know my family’s long history in the state, which is really special to me, and I wanted to write these stories down for them,” Chin explains.
He opens the book by musing on the question “For here or to go?”, which he often heard his father say while running Chung’s, a landmark Chinese American restaurant in Detroit. Chin ties the question to his great-great-grandfather’s decision, in the late 1880s, to move from Guangzhou,…
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