- [Narrator] Turning now to a memoir about life in Detroit's once thriving Chinatown district at the intersection of Cass and Peterboro.

Curtis Chin penned the book about his experiences working in the now closed Chung's Restaurant, which was owned by his family and served as a neighborhood anchor for more than 60 years.

One Detroit's Bill Kubota and contributor Chien-An Yuan talked with Chin about chronicling his life as a Chinese restaurant kid.

(bright music) - [Bill] Writer, activist, Curtis Chin's new book, "Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant," it's about growing up in Detroit in the 1980s, weaving his family's history running Chung's Restaurant, a community anchor in the now vanished Chinatown area of Cass and Peterboro.

Chin recently visited Metro Detroit to preview his book in a series of Q&As where we caught up with him.

- I just feel like I was the luckiest kid growing up in a Chinese restaurant.

Yeah, it was really, yeah, it was really a good time.

Growing up in a Chinese restaurant, being surrounded by your family, and your friends, and your cousins, eating as much free food as you want.

People always ask me like, "Well, your title of your book is "Everything I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant."

So what did you learn?"

And the first thing that I always say to them is, growing up, a lot of parents tell their kids "Don't talk to strangers," but my parents actually gave me the exact opposite advice.

And what they were talking about were the strangers in our dining room.

And so every time my dad met somebody who came from a different occupation, whether it was somebody worked on the factory line, where they were a doctor or a newspaper reporter, he would pull us over and say, "Talk to this person.

Ask them who they are.

Ask them how they got where they were."

And because of that, it opened up my eyes to like other possibilities in life beyond just working in a Chinese restaurant.

For decades, we had been feeding Detroit.

Our fans included celebrities like Smokey Robinson and Joni Mitchell, the Earl of Snowden, and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

We were all good at something.

Mgin-Ngin specialized in dumplings and sweets.

Yeh-Yeh excelled at barbecue pork and homemade tofu.

In a cross-cultural twist, my immigrant mom made the best American fare, while my native born dad cooked wonderful dishes from Hong Kong, - [Bill] Chin's book centers the Chinese community's history and struggles within Detroit's history.

He chronicles his family's journey to Detroit, spotlighting an immigrant story so familiar to so many here, and yet these stories remain hidden in the city's history.

Chin hopes to change that.

- One of my goals in writing the book was really to weave in my family's history with Detroit.

I think a lot of times you can look at literature and particularly literature of communities of color, and it comes off as like this sidebar to a main story of America.

And I really wanted to tie in my family's experience, the Asian American experience with the city itself so that you can see that they're intertwined, that you can't have one without the other.

And that was really important for me.

- Happy Thanksgiving!

- In Chinatown, though we followed our own headlines.

It was all about our Vincent.

Our workers were beside themselves as they felt such guilt for not being there to defend their friend.

A stream of ahoos and members of the online Chinese Merchant Association dropped by with updates from the hospital.

Emotions ping-ponged by the hour from hope to dread, and then back to hope.

It was scary and comforting to see so many faces I hadn't seen in years.

This time, the elders didn't even bring up my grades or report cards.

As a shock, Chinatown coped with the untimely loss of one of our own.

My mind kept returning to Vincent's mom, Lily.

Her face always had a natural smile, and I'd seen her slurping my mom's pork bone soup at the kitchen table in our home.

But when I saw her on television, her eyes and read only despair.

It was rare to see any Asians on TV, much less in public exposing their hurt.

But Lily epitomized the most universal figure in history, the grieving mother.

How could anyone hear her anguish and not think of their own mom?

I know I thought of mine.

My book talks a lot about Detroit history, and amazingly, a lot of students just don't know about the Vincent Chin case, but they also don't know about things like the Detroit riots, or the rebellion, or even Hudson's department store.

There's this rich history of this city that just is not being covered.

And that's why I want to talk about these things, and I wanna bring up these consciousness to these people so that they know the history of the city that they're from.

And I tried to do that with my book.

I weave in a lot of Detroit history.

The 1980s in Detroit were tumultuous times.

Trying to understand, accept, and establish my own identity by race, class, and sexuality was difficult, especially when these intersections contradicted and collided.

The important lessons that guided me through my childhood came served like a big Chinese banquet from the highs of cooking with my mom and dad to the lows of waiting on some of the rudest customers, a chorus of sweet and sour, salty and savory, sugary and spicy flavors that counseled me toward a well led and well fed life.

I grew up in Detroit in the 80s.

It was a really tough time period.

It was not just crack, AIDS.

I knew five people that had been murdered by the time I was 18 years old.

But at the same time, I loved my childhood.

I thought it was a great time growing up in Detroit, and I was very fortunate.

I had this wonderful restaurant on the corner of Cass and Peterboro that really provided a nurturing space and taught me a lot of values.

I wanna commemorate that.

And so in my memoir, yes, I do talk about the difficulties of growing up in Detroit in the 80s, but at the same time, I want readers to walk away and say like, yes, but good things did come out of that too.