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Curtis Chin stands outside his parents’ former Cass Corridor restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine.
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…
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