#100 Curtis Chin:
Lessons From A Chinese Restaurant

NICK FIRCHAU: Curtis Chin spent most of his childhood looking for a place to sit. Now, anyone from a big family knows what I mean when I say that. When you have five siblings, as Chin did, you are always trying to simply find that one small place away from the commotion, where you can just sit and think about where you belong.

But that was especially difficult for Curtis Chin, who literally couldn't find many places where he was allowed to sit when he was growing up. And that's because when he was a boy in the 1970s and 80s, his family ran Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, one of the most revered Chinese restaurants in Detroit, a place in the city's midtown district that seemed to be bustling at all hours with family members, cooks, and, of course, lots and lots of customers

Chung's had an elegant, fully carpeted dining room with wooden paintings of the Chinese countryside on the wall, booths with bright red vinyl seats, and room for 94 customers. But Chin certainly couldn't sit there. As a kid, he was often relegated to a sweaty back kitchen with his siblings, where all the places to rest were hard surfaces: A cast iron stove, a metal meat grinder, or the wooden mahjong table.

Sometimes he found a place atop a case of canned peaches, where he could see out the window to watch customers come and go, or spot a police car zooming by.

Now, maybe you didn't spend a large chunk of your childhood in the kitchen of a crowded restaurant, but I think that idea of where to sit, of where you belong, that feeling is familiar to everyone. We talk a lot about belonging and identity on this show, and in the case of some men, how they individuate from their own fathers and either embrace or reject what's passed down from their paternal figures. Especially if it's the family business.

And we're going to talk a lot about that on this episode, because by the time Curtis Chin was coming of age in that back kitchen, Chung's was a longstanding part of the family lore, and his father, a man most people lovingly called Big Al, ran the restaurant. Big Al greeted and waited on all the customers. And Curtis's mother and paternal grandmother helped prep and cook the food: Dumplings, almond boneless chicken, pork fried rice, and especially egg rolls. Chung’s sold more than 4,000 egg rolls every week back in those days, and the restaurant was frequented by celebrities all the time, like Joni Mitchell and Smokey Robinson, as well as Senator Eugene McCarthy and Coleman A. Young, Detroit's first African American mayor.

But it was also a welcome destination for late-night pimps and prostitutes, simply looking for a bite to eat. And that's where I want to start this episode, with the restaurant itself. Chung's dated back to 1940, when two of Curtis's great uncles opened the doors at the restaurant's original location, in Detroit's old Chinatown neighborhood. Chinese food first arrived in America during the Gold Rush era of the mid 19th Century, and by the 1940s and 50s, Chinese restaurants had popped up in every American city. Industrial cities like Detroit offered plenty of high wage factory jobs and a comfortable middle class lifestyle. And Chinese restaurants offered a reliable, affordable dining option for everyone.

But they were also open late. They were open on Christmas. African American customers who might face discrimination in a local diner could easily find a seat. And simply put, the food was good.

Here's Curtis Chin, on Paternal.

CURTIS CHIN: I think if you think back to the history of Chinese restaurants, I think that there are several factors as to why they probably exploded. They're very accessible, right? From what I hear, the restaurant in the early days used to be open as late as 4 a.m., because in Detroit, people would go bowling and then they'd like to get a meal afterwards, right? And I don't know what was open late in the 50s? Diners were probably open, but if you didn't want a diner, you know, you can go out for Chinese food, right? And they were open late. The price point was pretty good. They also went into other neighborhoods where other business owners wouldn't go, right? Like, in some of the more inner-city neighborhoods, Chinese restaurant owners would go in there.

And because the style of making Chinese food is based on the wok where you can improvise a lot more than other types of cuisine. We could really cater to the taste of our local clientele. Like if anybody came in and asked for a special order, like, you know, Oh, throw in a few extra shrimp, hey, no problem. You know, fried rice instead of white rice, we could accommodate people. And I think that maybe that might've made people feel comfortable too.

Pre-COVID there were over 40, 000 Chinese restaurants in America, which meant there were more Chinese restaurants than KFC's Taco Bell and Burger King combined. I mean, they really are just everywhere. And plus, at the end of the day, it's just great tasting food. You know what I mean? And I always start off every presentation by asking people to guess how many egg rolls we sold over the 60 years, right? Over the 60 years, we sold over 10 million egg rolls. You don't sell 10 million egg rolls unless, you know, they're really popular, right?

God, I'm just getting hungry thinking about it.

NICK FIRCHAU: To understand exactly what Chung's Cantonese Cuisine meant to the city of Detroit, it's important to understand a brief history of the city, which, back in the 1940s, was the fourth largest city in the country, bigger than Los Angeles or Boston. But white flight, an over reliance on the auto industry, and a devastating race riot in 1967 ushered in a new era for the city that saw a steady decline in population and a frightening increase in crime, poverty, drug use, and prostitution in the city's most dilapidated neighborhoods, most notably the Cass Corridor, where Chung's was located.

Chung's was a beloved anchor business in the area by the time Curtis Chin was born in 1968. But even as the restaurant's business remained steady, the neighborhood around Chung's deteriorated. When Chin was a kid, most of the businesses around Chung's were seedy bars, adult only bookstores, or hotels that charged by the hour.

There were occasional robberies at other businesses in the area. And there were also botched robberies that led to murders. And for a while, when Chin was seven years old, his parents wouldn't let him or his siblings leave the restaurant alone, because there was a serial killer on the loose called the Bigfoot Killer, who had murdered seven girls in the area.

But Chung's was a safe place for Chin, who recently released his memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. The book was named one of the best books of 2023 by the Boston Globe, and dubbed “friendly, seemingly effortless and intimate” by the Washington Post. The book chronicles how Chin navigated coming of age in the restaurant and in and around Detroit, which has undergone a dramatic revitalization in recent years, but was still in the throes of a crisis when Chin was growing up.

CURTIS CHIN: Yeah, so Detroit in general was having a lot of problems in the 80s. Not only did you have the auto industry that was continuing to fall apart, but you also had crack cocaine, you also had AIDS coming about. I knew five people murdered by the time I was 18. If you actually look at the crime stats, our precinct actually was, you know, the worst precinct for crime in Detroit. A lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, you know, like, prostitution, things like that, and murder. A lot of deaths.

Despite all that, we had this one little bubble. In it, basically like this place that was known as New Chinatown, it basically stretched from one block each way, right? And so in that world, my parents, um, said, okay, well you can go down one street each way, but that's it. We actually lived in the suburbs and then we worked downtown and so we would drive down to work, and it was amazing how we would just park the car and we would run to go inside the restaurant, particularly when we were arriving at night or leaving at night, we’d run inside.

But it always felt like as soon as we closed the front door, this big red door we had, it felt safe. It felt like it was like a completely different world than, you know, the people that were passing by around us, whether it was homeless people or the drunk people or the prostitutes. But as soon as we entered into that restaurant, it just, it felt really safe for some reason. You know, we had carpeting, we had nice Chinese artwork on the walls. It was one of the, um, few places that you could dine in, in that area, right, where you felt like it was a safe space.

NICK FIRCHAU: I want to ask you a little bit about your parents and, and your dad specifically. We talk about family stories a lot on this show. And one of the questions I like to ask sometimes is if the guest knows how his parents met. And your parents have a story that I don't think is like many of the others that we've had on this show in that they were arranged to be together. Like, it was an arranged marriage. Your grandmother sent your dad to British Hong Kong to “find a nice Chinese wife, one who would also fold dumplings for free.” Can you elaborate on that?

CURTIS CHIN: Yeah, so my dad was born in America, in Detroit. His family had a Chinese restaurant, and at some point, he was asked by his mom, my grandmother, to settle down a bit, right?

So he dropped out of community college to start working at the restaurant, and soon after, she also wanted him to get married for additional help at the restaurant. You know, free labor. My grandmother still had contacts back in Hong Kong, and so she sent my dad back there to meet a prospective candidate.

And to my dad's surprise when he got there, that girl already had a secret boyfriend. And so he started a search himself. He reached out to another matchmaker there and, you know, got set up with my mom. I think my mom said they had like two dates. So technically my mom could have said no, but I think there was so much social pressure for her to say yes, you know, so she got married.

NICK FIRCHAU: And she was pretty young at that point, right?

CURTIS CHIN: She was 17 and she was a top student at a very prestigious high school that she had actually gotten a scholarship to get into because, um, you know, she'd taken a test, right? And gotten in. And so she imagined herself having a really different future, but at that time, at the same time that Detroit was rioting, Hong Kong was also having riots too, because the Chinese government was fomenting unrest there. And because my family had already escaped China once, going from mainland China to Hong Kong, my grandparents were really worried about having to repeat that process all over, and so they started marrying off all their daughters. to people in America. And my mom ended up in Detroit.

NICK FIRCHAU: I want to quote you here and you're writing about sort of the organization inside the restaurant. You write that quote, “my dad and I might've been in the same building, but we rarely saw each other. The restaurant had two distinct halves. The women and children were stuck in the sweaty back kitchen, but the men got to be in the air conditioned dining room.” You've also said that quote, “Chinatown in general was a very patriarchal society. It was all Chinese men chomping on their cigars.”

So I'm curious what you took from, from that or from what other observations you picked up about what men were supposed to be, what women were supposed to be, or where they belonged. How much did you pick up on that stuff and, and did it resonate with you?

CURTIS CHIN: I did. So there's a unique quirk in the history of Chinese Americans and immigration because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and an early act called the Page Act, Chinese women were not allowed to come to this country. And so you develop these things called bachelor societies, where they were really all men, you know? I think at some point it was like 90 something percent of the Chinese American population were men. So you had this imbalance, but you also had a society that really favored men that was created, whether it was through the associations or the events that they were held. By the time I came around, there were still the remnants of it. So it was still a very male-dominated society, even though you started seeing women and you started seeing kids.

We had a gambling den underneath our basement of our restaurant, right? And only men could go down there. The women were not allowed. But as a young boy, I was allowed to go. And I always thought that was kind of weird. It's like, Oh, why can't the women go down? I mean, even the older women, right? Like, why can't my grandma and my mom go down there? But yet I, as a young boy, I was able to go.

It was only after I got older that we started also having more women work for us. So really growing up, the early days was really, it was a very male-dominated. So in terms of the rigid hierarchy of, you know, men thumping their chest and women cooking, no, because you know, the guys also had to do what were deemed as traditional female roles. Like cooking. All the men cooked.

NICK FIRCHAU: You call your dad Big Al. He's like a soft-spoken guy who kind of drifts in and out of the book, but he's always there when you're in the restaurant. How would you describe what your father was like? What sticks out about him at this time that we're talking about when you were growing up?

CURTIS CHIN: Because my dad waited tables, I always saw him as someone who was very friendly. I mean, customer service was who he was and what he was about, right? So he was always just greeting people, you know, smiling. I think it's very similar to me in the sense that we were both very lucky in the sense that we were inheriting this restaurant, right? It was founded by my great grandfather in 1940. So by the time we were really active in it, It had already established a customer base. People coming in were generations of customers.

It'd be like growing up in Cheers, you know, the bar? You know, you're working in a bar, but it's not a bad thing because, you know, all these people are coming in. Literally, the mayor of Detroit down to the pimps and prostitutes that, you know, work the street corner right outside of our restaurant. And I think because of that, not only did it make me comfortable, talking to people from different backgrounds, it also taught me not to be afraid, but also to judge people for who they were. It wasn't necessarily how someone was dressed or their skin color or whatnot. It really was people's actions.

It made me really just judge people for who they are or to look beyond the surface, I think. And so I feel like that's, that's been a real gift that my parents gave me. I like to think that, you know, even though I don't work in a Chinese restaurant anymore, I still live my life as a Chinese waiter. I still go around asking people, Oh, how can I help you? How can I make your life better? And I think that's always served me well. I mean, I'm a people pleaser in that way. And you know, some people just enjoy doing that and I'm one of those people. I like making people happy and that's always brought me joy.

NICK FIRCHAU: So you had celebrities come into the restaurant from time to time, maybe even somewhat often. You mentioned Smokey Robinson, Joni Mitchell, Eugene McCarthy, the mayor, Coleman Young. But one of the moments that struck me because it sort of dovetails with this conversation about manhood is when Yule Brenner came into the restaurant. I don't know how many of our listeners would know, I certainly had to do a little bit of research. Who was Yul Brynner and what happened that night when he came into Chung’s?

CURTIS CHIN: So Yul Brynner was this famous Broadway, Oscar-winning actor, right? Like he was most noted for a role of the King of Siam in The King and I, the famous Broadway musical.

AUDIO FROM THE KING AND I:

You are a very difficult woman.

Perhaps so, your majesty.

But you'll observe care that your head shall never be higher than mine. When I shall sit, you shall sit. When I shall kneel, you shall kneel. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

CURTIS CHIN: I'm not a film historian, but I would guess that he's probably, like, the action hero star equivalent of that day. And so, the idea that an A-list Hollywood star would be coming to our restaurant was really quite exciting in Detroit. By that time period, Detroit was no longer seen as a cultural hub or as a place to go. And the fact that The King and I wanted to come back, it was an exciting thing. And then when they said that they wanted to actually host their cast party at our restaurant, you know, we were doubly excited. And particularly my dad, who had always felt like Chinese restaurants had a bad reputation as not being fine dining.

And so the fact that these celebrities were coming just made him feel really excited and just, you know, it bumped up his ego. But unfortunately, you know, Yule was not the kindest customer.

NICK FIRCHAU: Yeah, and you write that he wouldn't really interact with any of the staff, and that at the end of the meal, when your father asked to take a photo with him, he declined, he wouldn't do it.

CURTIS CHIN: I don't know. I mean, in retrospect, now thinking back on it, okay, I can get it. Maybe he doesn't want to be interrupted, you know, during a cast party. But it was at the end of the meal and he was just heading out, and my dad is the owner of the restaurant. You would think that he would have done that because my dad did really bend over backwards to accommodate him and have extra things around the restaurant and just make sure it was extra clean, et cetera, et cetera.

But yeah, I guess that didn't merit much to this guy. Maybe he had his reasons, but it was, it was a little disappointing to think that my dad was working so hard to make this guy's night so special and not to be recognized.

I think that's what it boiled down to, right? Because everybody idolizes these Hollywood actors, these big celebrities, but then you don't notice the Chinese waiter who's sort of in the background and doing these all little things to make someone's life better. And to me that is a much more worthwhile person to emulate, the person that's out there not necessarily being the center of attention, but maybe the person who's in the background supporting other people? I've always appreciated that, right? It's not always the people who are front and center who deserve the love and accolades. Maybe sometimes it's the people hidden in the shadows. And so I thought that about my dad, definitely.

NICK FIRCHAU: We'll have more from author Curtis Chin, and he'll discuss the legacy of Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, in a second. But if this is the first time you've listened to this show, or maybe you're a relatively new fan who caught on in 2023, you can go back and listen to all of our episodes dating back to 2017 in our archives at paternalpodcast.com. That's where you can hear conversations with men like comedian and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell, author and activist Bill McKibben, Newbery Medal-winning author Kwame Alexander, or CNN lead anchor Jake Tapper.

JAKE TAPPER: But the idea that we're not all human and insecure and full of doubt and like, you know, that we don't sometimes wake up in the middle of the night worried about stupid shit and that we don't worry about what people think about us or say about us or that we're impervious to criticism?

I mean, it's all crap. It's all a facade. None of it's real. And the people who admit it are stronger people, and the people who don't admit it, in my view, are weaker.

NICK FIRCHAU: Check out the show's archives wherever you're listening right now to listen to that episode and many more. Or you can find it on paternalpodcast.com, which is also where you can sign up for our newsletter, which offers a sneak peek into future episodes we have coming on the show. You can also email me at nick@paternalpodcast.com with any comments or suggestions for men we should profile on the show. Make sure you subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening, then keep an eye on your feed for new episodes.

I'm Nick Firchau and this is Paternal.

When Curtis Chin was 12 years old, he and his older brother Craig decided to wander outside of Chung's Cantonese Cuisine one afternoon to do a little sightseeing in the neighborhood. They walked about a block away to a big party store they'd seen before, but this wasn't like a suburban party store you might be familiar with that sells party supplies, balloons, and confetti. This party store, a Cass Corridor party store, sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, Mad Dog 2020 wine, and adult magazines.

Chin and his brother wandered into the store and spotted some familiar titles like Penthouse and Penthouse Letters. Chin's brother picked up a copy of Playboy Magazine and flipped to the centerfold, but Chin couldn't really understand the appeal.

“When I looked over his shoulder and took in the view, pages of naked white girls in stretched out poses, I wondered what the big deal was,” Chin writes in his memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. “In fact, I didn't feel anything at all. No excitement, no guilt, nothing. Until I spotted another title for sale, Playgirl.”

Chin began noticing that some boys were better-looking than others as early as first grade. And by the fourth grade, he knew he simply wanted to spend more time with the better looking-boys. When he was in seventh grade, Diana Ross put out her hit single, “I'm Coming Out,” which became an anthem for the LGBTQ community. But Chin didn't really understand what it might mean for him. He knew he was attracted to boys, but he had no idea what his family might say if they knew. And there were very few, if any, positive gay role models.

CURTIS CHIN: Back then, I mean, the images of gay people were really quite limited, right? They were comedians, they were more effeminate, they were snappy and witty. There was no masculine sense of being a gay person. And, you know, when you're growing up in the Midwest, that's the image that's more prized, right? It's not like an urban culture in that way, like, you know, living on the coast.

So, there were no positive images of gay people. Gay people back then were lumped in with pedophiles, alcoholics. You know, they were the criminals. I mean, it really was that bad. It really was quite stark, right? To first get out of that classification and then coming up with role models beyond that. The only time I ever saw gay men in the media was when they were on their deathbed because of AIDS, right? That's the only time they ever talked about them. And so that combined with the fact that I'd seen so much death, you know, as a kid, I literally did not think I'd live past the age of 30.

You know, a lot of times these days we tell young people it gets better. right? That's a very, very common phrase. But I've since tried to think back on my own childhood and asked myself, what were the things that gave me hope to, um, think that things would get better? And I didn't have any. I never, as a young person, I never saw a vision of a perfect world where things would get better, right? For gay people, like, it's not like I could envision and say, Oh, I'm going to move to San Francisco and come out and that's going to be great. Because San Francisco and New York were the epicenter of the AIDS deaths. So it's not like there was any place to escape, right? It was just a matter of when would this disease finally hit Detroit, right? And at what numbers?

So in some ways you're just sort of trying to escape that fate. And so yeah, no, there were no role models. I can clearly say that there were no role models. There was nothing positive to look forward to. Maybe the first glimpse of a role model was when I was in college, and, um, I started to maybe read a couple of writers that were gay, or I think I stumbled upon, um, something which talked about Harvey Milk. But that was by the time, it took all the way up to the college years, really, to see anybody that was even positive, and there were certainly no contemporary figures, like nobody on TV or anything that made it seem like, oh, that, that's a good, great role model.

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, you just said something that I think you say a few times in the book, that you didn't expect to live past 30 years old.

CURTIS CHIN: But you know what? I've talked to other gay men from my era and they also say the same thing. I think it's a generational thing. Like a lot of gay men, you know, born in the late 60s, who came of age during AIDS, you know, cause AIDS was coming around when we were pre teens, right, around that time period. Right when all our straight counterparts are just suddenly starting to date and get a sense of their sexual identity, that's what we were met with.

NICK FIRCHAU: You write at one point in the book, “My greatest fear about being outed was that I might be banished from my family.” You write that you wanted to de-gay yourself, that you would stand in the shower and say to yourself, Don't be gay, don't be gay, don't be gay. I mean, obviously, you're out now, but can you describe what you felt as a young man, as a teenager, and that fear of your parents learning the truth?

CURTIS CHIN: Growing up, my top priority was always to make my parents happy, because I knew how much they were sacrificing, not just for me, but for my five siblings. And I knew the difficulties of operating a Chinese restaurant in the inner city, during a very difficult time period. And I knew that my parents were making these extreme sacrifices for me, and I also knew that my parents didn't have opportunities in life. So I just really wanted to make my parents happy.

That was my whole goal. And still is, to a large degree today. I just want to make my parents happy. And I knew that, or I felt that, coming out would not make them happy. Partly because it wasn't what they pictured for themselves. I didn't necessarily fear myself, like what would happen to me. I just accepted it. I was more concerned about how they would handle it. I probably stayed in the closet a lot longer than I needed to. I didn't come out to my parents until my mid twenties, which back then was a perfectly acceptable age, right? I mean, nowadays kids are coming out when they're like five, you know? But back then it was a different time period and a lot more people waited.

NICK FIRCHAU: I don't want to spoil the book here and I don't think this actually does spoil the book, but you didn't come out to your parents in this book. You don't write about that specifically. That came later in life.

CURTIS CHIN: I don't actually come out to my parents in this book, partly because I didn't feel that was necessary. Because at the end of the day, as a gay person, you know that the process of coming out is something you will do throughout the rest of your life. Even now as a 55 year-old man, I'm still coming out. Whether or not it came out to my parents or my siblings or whoever didn't really matter as long as I came out to myself.

As long as I accepted who I was, then I know that all these other things in the end would just be a variation on a theme in some ways and yes, some have a higher stake than others, whether you come out to your family or where you come out to your bosses at work, whether you come out to your friends in your fellow political club, right?

All these things have different stakes. So because I know that the coming out process isn't a journey with a finite ending where it's like, Oh, okay. I came out. That's it. I'm done. Whether I include my parents, it didn't really matter. And I actually talk about this in the book where I said, like, one of the things I learned working in a Chinese restaurant was the importance of timing. You know, when to bring out the soup, when to pay the bill, right? Everything, nothing could be rushed, you know? And I felt like that's the same thing with coming out. It's like everything had its purpose at a certain time. I'm not gonna rush it just because.

And my parents are fine because my dad, you know, he had gay customers, right? And he was friends with them. So his best friends were like this gay couple, and he started talking to them, and they gave him really stereotypical advice. They were like, Oh, gay people are really successful, they make lots of money, they go to the theater, all these stereotypes about gay people. And after that, my parents are fine, because at the end of the day, I think your parents really just want to make sure that you're happy, right? Once they saw this gay couple and they connected with them, okay, maybe this is, you know, going to be okay after all.

NICK FIRCHAU: Your dad closed the Detroit restaurant in 2000. And I've heard you say, I think it was in a different interview, that it was sort of an abrupt decision and that there was very little fanfare when it closed down. Like, your dad didn't want to make a big deal out of closing the restaurant?

CURTIS CHIN: Yeah, that was really sad to me because I was living in Los Angeles at the time and my dad just surprised us: Oh, I'm closing the restaurant. And I was shocked by it because I just always imagined Chung's restaurant being around. It was an iconic restaurant in Detroit. I just thought I would always be able to go home and have an egg roll. But, after he convinced me that he had to do it for financial reasons, because there was too much capital improvements that needed to happen and the landlord wasn't willing to do them, I said, okay, fine, if you're going to close the restaurant, at least have a big party, a big send off, because you've been open for so long, I'm sure there's a lot of people who'd want to come back in just to say thanks or whatever, but my dad didn't want to do that.

I don't know if it was because my dad would have been too sad doing that, like saying goodbye to everybody. Or if maybe on a deeper level, maybe he felt he had failed the family because it closed underneath his watch. And so he just sort of closed it. So it was … it was, sad.

NICK FIRCHAU: The Cass Corridor location of Chung's Cantonese Cuisine shut down after 40 years of business in 2000. And Chin's parents relocated the business to the suburb of Waterford, where it remained until October 2005. Chin had left the family business years before to pursue a writing career in New York, and never seriously harbored ideas that he would take over the restaurant. Instead, he bounced around the country a little bit for work, and eventually landed a gig as a television writer in Los Angeles.

And then in 2005, he received a phone call that His parents had been involved in a serious car accident back home in Michigan. His mother was seriously injured, and his father, the man he and many of Chung's faithful customers called Big Al, had died.

CURTIS CHIN: It was terrible. I was writing for the Disney Channel at that time, and I get this terrible phone call in the morning, and I'm on the airplane by that afternoon. And my dad had passed and my mom was severely injured. And so we had to move her out to the Bay Area where my brother was a doctor. I was the one out of the six kids that was tasked to stay behind and sell the family business after the funeral and everything. Plus, there was a lot of cleaning up to do. Like the house was in a mess. You know what I mean? It was just really bad.

I think that part of the reason I was the one asked to take care of everything was because during those, those days, you know, in the hospital with my mom and stuff like that, I was the one person that wasn't crying. I was the one that didn't break down. I was the one so focused on these other things we need to do. And so I was left behind in Detroit by myself, having to run the restaurant, a restaurant I hadn't been in, you know, in decades, and trying to remember all these things from the past.

And the only time that I could think about my dad was sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, I would sneak off to the movies, because Brokeback Mountain had just come out and I would, I would sit in the dark and just cry. And I'm sure if there was anybody else in the theater, they thought I was crying for Jake Gyllenhaal. But really, I was crying for my dad. It was just because I had a lot of great years with my dad, you know, and because when you work in a family business, you know, sure, as a little kid, I didn't see him much because he was in the dining room, but after I graduated and moved into the dining room, I saw him all the time.

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, the property where Chung's was located in the Corridor is still there. Like, it has not been torn down. It's still there. And in fact, I think I read that it had been sold to a development group last year and that the new owners intend to put in a new Asian-inspired restaurant. What do you think about the legacy of Chung's and like, how do you feel about it now and what it meant to you?

CURTIS CHIN: When I left Michigan to go start a writing career, I did not look back. But as I've gotten older … is there always grief? Is there always nostalgia in life? Is there always looking back? I mean, do you always just move forward? I don't know.

One of the great things about this book tour is that I've had so many former customers come up to me and say, thank you. And so I've had a chance to also thank them for giving me and my siblings and the rest of my family's this wonderful life by supporting our family's restaurant. I'm getting to give the thank you that my family never gave to people. And so that's been really nice.

The location where I grew up, which was in the inner city, that building has remained empty for the past 20 years. But just to show you how iconic that restaurant was, when the new owners bought the property this past year as part of the gentrification of Detroit, they actually went through the trouble of tracking me down in Los Angeles, asking me if I would reopen the business. And for about five seconds, I thought like, yeah! And I thought, wait a second, I'm on a book tour. I can't do this.

I did reconcile myself and I thought like, okay, you know, when the owners told me that they did find someone to move in, I was a little sad that it wouldn't be our restaurant, but at the end of the day, I was like, okay, well, whoever moves into this space, may they find as much happiness and success as my family did, because it really was a great childhood.

And despite all the difficulties of Detroit, despite all the things that I saw, I wouldn't trade my childhood for anybody. To me, it was a great childhood.

NICK FIRCHAU: That's writer Curtis Chin. If you'd like to learn more about his memoir, Everything I Learned I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, we'll put a link in the notes for this episode.

Paternal is written, edited, and produced by me, Nick Firchau. You can email me at nick@paternalpodcast.com or I'm on Twitter at nickfirchau. The Paternal logo was designed by Trevor Port.

I'm Nick Firchau, and this is Paternal.