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Curtis Chin, author of Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir

1980s 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 spiraling misfortunes; and where he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family and to himself.

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Week of September 30, 2024

Paperback releases for the week of September 30th include THE VASTER WILDS, a taut and electrifying novel from Lauren Groff about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive; BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CHRISTMAS by Mary Kay Andrews,   a novella celebrating love and the warm, glittering charm of the holiday season; Ben Fountain's DEVIL MAKES THREE, a brilliant and propulsive novel about greed, power and American complicity set in Haiti; THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF RUDOLF DIESEL, a rich saga from Douglas Brunt that reopens the hundred-year-old mystery of what really became of Rudolf Diesel, one of the world’s greatest inventors, who disrupted the status quo and then disappeared into thin air on the eve of World War I; and EVERYTHING I LEARNED, I LEARNED IN A CHINESE RESTAURANT, a savory coming-of-age memoir that tells the story of Curtis Chin’s time growing up as a gay Chinese American kid in 1980s Detroit. 

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