Join the Association of Chinese Americans on October 29 for an evening with Detroit-born author Curtis Chin, whose acclaimed memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant tells a deeply personal story of family, identity, and growing up Chinese American in Detroit.
Please note: This event will be conducted in English.
What can a Chinese restaurant teach us about family, identity, race, community, and what it means to belong in America?
For author Curtis Chin, the answer is: almost everything.
On Thursday, October 29, 2026, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM, Curtis Chin will visit the Association of Chinese Americans (ACA) Chinese Community Center in Madison Heights for a special evening centered on his acclaimed memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.
Hosted by the ACA Teen Volunteer Council, this Great Michigan Read partner event will invite audiences to explore three themes at the heart of Chin’s story:
Identity. Community. Resilience.
Growing Up in a Detroit Chinese Restaurant
Curtis Chin was born and raised in Detroit, where his family owned Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, a longtime restaurant in Detroit’s historic Chinatown.
But Chung’s was much more than a family business.
It was where Chin grew up, where generations of his family worked, and where people from remarkably different walks of life crossed paths. The restaurant became a window into the complicated world beyond his family—one shaped by race, class, immigration, sexuality, politics, and the dramatic changes taking place in Detroit.
In his memoir, Chin recalls a childhood surrounded by a large Chinese American family and an equally colorful cast of customers. Politicians, celebrities, neighborhood residents, drag queens, businesspeople, and families could all find themselves sharing the same dining room.
For a young Curtis Chin, the restaurant became a classroom.
There, he began learning how people saw one another—and how America saw him.
A Menu Becomes a Map of Memory
Published in 2023, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is structured around the menu of Chung’s.
That creative choice transforms something as ordinary as a restaurant menu into a map of memory. Food opens the door to stories about Chin’s parents and siblings, the family business, Detroit, race relations, his Chinese American heritage, and his coming of age as a gay Asian American.
The result is a memoir that is often funny and warm, but never afraid to confront difficult questions.
How do we define ourselves when our family, our community, and the wider society may have different expectations of who we should be?
What does it mean to be both Chinese and American?
How do families preserve their heritage while allowing the next generation to find its own way?
And how does a community remain resilient when the city and society around it are changing?
These questions make Chin’s story deeply personal, but also remarkably universal.
A Detroit Story—and a Michigan Story
For Metro Detroit audiences, there is another reason this book matters.
This is not a story set in New York or San Francisco.
It is a Detroit story.
Today, it can be difficult to imagine the vibrant Chinese American community that once existed around Detroit’s historic Chinatown. Restaurants, businesses, families, and community institutions created a neighborhood whose history remains an important part of the larger story of Detroit.
Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine was part of that world.
Through Chin’s memories, readers encounter a Detroit undergoing enormous economic, demographic, and social change. His personal coming-of-age story unfolds alongside the story of the city itself.
That connection is one reason Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant was selected by Michigan Humanities as the 2025–26 Great Michigan Read.
The Great Michigan Read brings people across the state together around a single book, using literature as a starting point for conversations about Michigan’s history, culture, communities, and shared experiences.
A story that began inside one Chinese restaurant in Detroit has now become a story being read across Michigan.
About Curtis Chin
Curtis Chin is an author, filmmaker, and activist born and raised in Detroit.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin was a co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York and served as its first executive director. His career has included television writing, documentary filmmaking, community advocacy, and writing for publications including CNN, Bon Appétit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Boston Globe.
His documentary work has been screened around the world, and his short documentary Dear Corky, about acclaimed Asian American photographer Corky Lee, was featured by PBS American Masters.
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant has received significant national and statewide recognition, including being named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a 2024 Michigan Notable Book.
Yet beneath those accolades is something much more intimate: the story of a child trying to understand his family, his city, his country, and himself.
Why This Conversation Matters
For immigrant families, many parts of Chin’s story may feel familiar: parents working long hours, family members sharing the responsibilities of a small business, hopes for the next generation, and the sacrifices required to build a life in a new country.
For second- and third-generation Asian Americans, other parts may resonate just as strongly: navigating different expectations at home and in the wider world, trying to understand cultural heritage while developing an independent identity, and asking the deceptively simple question:
Where do I belong?
These are not questions limited to one generation—or even one community.
That is why Chin’s memoir provides such a meaningful opportunity for conversation across generations. Parents may recognize pieces of their own journeys in the experiences of Chin’s family, while younger readers may recognize his struggle to reconcile heritage, family expectations, and individual identity.
Sometimes, listening to someone else tell his story helps us understand our own.
The Story Returns to the Community
There is something especially meaningful about welcoming Curtis Chin back to a Chinese American community in Metro Detroit.
A boy grows up in his family’s restaurant in Detroit’s Chinatown.
Decades later, he turns those memories into a book.
That book becomes the Great Michigan Read, inviting people throughout the state to learn about a Chinese American family, a changing Detroit, and the complicated process of finding one’s place in America.
And on October 29, Curtis Chin will bring that conversation back to the community.
The story began in community. Now it returns to community.
Event Information
An Evening with Curtis Chin
Identity · Community · Resilience
Thursday, October 29, 2026
6:30–8:00 PM
ACA Chinese Community Center
32585 Concord Drive
Madison Heights, MI 48071
Featured Book:
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
Hosted by:
ACA Teen Volunteer Council
Language:
This event will be conducted in English.
Please use the “RSVP & More” QR code on the event flyer to register and find additional information.
Some History Is Written in Archives. Some Is Hidden in a Menu.
We often imagine history as something grand—presidential elections, wars, economic upheavals, famous people, and major social movements.
But history can also live in an old restaurant menu.
It can survive in the memory of a kitchen that never seemed to stop.
It can be found in parents who worked day after day to give their children opportunities they never had.
It can live in the recollections of a child answering the telephone, helping around the restaurant, watching customers come and go, and slowly learning how complicated the world outside his family’s doors could be.
Curtis Chin reminds us that these stories matter, too.
If your family has an immigration story; if you have ever navigated more than one culture; if you care about the history of Detroit’s Chinese American community; if you are interested in questions of identity, belonging, and resilience—or if you simply appreciate a compelling story—we invite you to join us.
October 29 at 6:30 PM.
Come hear Curtis Chin tell the story of what one Chinese restaurant taught him about family, Detroit, America—and himself.
We look forward to welcoming you to the ACA Chinese Community Center.
