Poured Over Double Shot: Bryan Washington and Curtis Chin

By Jenna Seery / October 14, 2023 at 6:00 am

Family Meal by Bryan Washington features the importance of food, friends and connection with a cast of characters working through the transitions in life. Washington joins us to talk about the identity of place, how he writes the messiness of life, staying truthful to characters and their struggles and more.

Curtis Chin’s Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant follows the author’s life as he grew up in and around his family’s restaurant where he came to better understand himself and those around him. Chin joins us to talk about the perils of writing about your relatives, the nuances of cultural identity, a very particular Detroit meal and more.

Listen in as these authors speak separately with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. 

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.      

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Featured Books (Episode):
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin
Memorial by Bryan Washington
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell
Mott Street by Ava Chin
The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Bryan Washington, I am so happy to see you. I love Memorial. It was a Discover Pick back in 2020 when it was first published in hardcover, Family Meal is here. And I have so many questions, and we’re going to cover so much ground but most importantly, hi. It’s really great to see you.

Bryan Washington

Likewise, yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It’s a big joy for me.

So Memorial, and I know I said this to you every single time. I see you and you’re probably tired of hearing this and I totally respect that. But as a person with a Japanese mama, Mitsuko, our Japanese mama in Memorial is one of my favorite pieces of that novel. I just I love her so much. And I don’t get Mitsuko in Family Meal. But you give me a whole new cast of folks. You give me Cam and TJ and May and Jen. Oh, no Bri. I can’t leave out Bri. I love Bri, this wonderful, wonderful cast. And you know, Memorial. I think you’ve also said this before famously started as a short story. And it only had Benson’s point of view. And obviously it became Benson and Mike and Mitsuko. And some other folks, how did we get Family Meal? When did you start working on this?

That’s interesting, because it was a similar situation right? Directly analogous to Memorial and that it started directly from a short story. But I was working on a project that I knew would have something to do with a bakery. Although I wasn’t entirely sure how sustainable that would be, because I also wanted to write about friendship and probably more specifically queer friendship. That project began with Cam and TJ, I knew some degree, you know that both of those voices would be necessary if I wanted to write about the friendship between two people having both, or ample space for both parties felt as though it made a sort of sense. I kept running into a wall where there was a emotional plateau that kept hitting something that’s really important to me when I’m writing about characters that are from marginalized communities or underrepresented communities is not to lean into tragedy not to lean into trauma because so often, that is the only light, primary nightlight that which these characters are seen, and I extremely did not want to do that. But I also found that it was challenging to tell this particular story about two friends who are trying to figure out how to make a friendship work, but also just how to make their respective lives and situations work with one another as they’ve changed over time without alluding to the challenges of the times in which they were living. And when I introduced a voice or more specifically as a present tense, because that’s when the entire feel of the novel began to shift began to feel more honest, going forward.

Okay, I got that. I got that honesty piece. Luis Alberto Urrea describes you as a one man border eradication crew. And I love this because when I’m reading your work, I get everyone. I got the world. It’s not just this tiny corner, and it’s partially Houston. And I’ve only been to Houston a couple of times. I like what you guys are doing there. It’s really interesting and fun and smart. But you’re also wrestling with a lot of the same things. We are on the coasts, gentrification and opportunity and queer spaces and what those mean and family of course, I mean, family, doesn’t matter where you are. But can we talk about how Houston informs Family Meal as well because it’s Houston is Houston and Osaka are both characters, obviously Memorial but Houston, we’re grounded in Houston in a way with a little side, but to Los Angeles and a bit of New Orleans. But Houston is a much bigger presence actually in this book than it is in Memorial, I felt at least.

Yeah, that tracks for me as well, in what felt interesting to me. And what feels interesting to me is the way in which a neighborhood can change, right like the physical characteristics of that neighborhood can change. The business that you frequent to for 20 years can disappear, where everyone’s really nice to you can dissolve over night, but the emotional landscape is a little bit harder to disappear, right you’ll feel at least an iteration of things. A had occupied, you’re preoccupied you any given space. And there’s neighborhood in Houston, Montrose it is this name, the city’s canonical gayborhood. And there are a number of significant changes that have occurred and that place over time and that space over time largely by way of money, largely by way of development, but any other case, the physical landscape of that neighborhood has changed, but also the less tangible bits, which is to say, you literally see occupying these spaces who feels welcome. In these particular spaces, even though the neighborhood is brandish done is allotted as being a queer space, the question of who is allowed to occupy that became one that was of paramount importance to me, particularly, as we were entering a phase of the pandemic, where folks were like, out and about and again, and comfortable being around one another the discrepancies of which demographics, were able or felt comfortable in these spaces were really loud. And even, you know, in a city like Houston that is deeply diverse. So much of family meal is me working through the question, how queer spaces can change, we can feel welcome in a space that loves itself, as we’re, and how we ourselves are changed by way of spending time. And these spaces, I’m thinking predominantly queer spaces and amillennial that I imagine that’s something that is shared by most anyone, if you have a place that made you feel joy, or you had a place that made you feel quite challenged, or if you have a place, experience, first love, where you have a place where you experienced betrayal, and so on, like that emotion stays with you in that space, even as you change, you know, seeing the way in which that push and pull, impact each of these characters as they navigate their own relationships felt really important to me. And it also felt as though Houston was the city that I wanted to try to pull that off.

I’m thinking of actually Colson Whiteheads Colossus of New York, listening to you talk about Houston, right? Like it’s his map of how New York has changed. And I’ve been back in the city for more than a minute now. And the changes I’ve seen, and that I was here as a kid, and then coming back, it’s been wild, and also watching Los Angeles change in sort of the last 20 years has been, there’s a sense of loss that I wasn’t necessarily expecting. And I don’t know how much of that is age, and how much of that is watching the shifts, right. Like, there’s some really great changes that have happened in Los Angeles. And there’s some where I’m just like, what is, we are barbarians? What is going on here. And it does have to do with money. It has to do with housing, it has to do with all of the messy pieces that no one right now seems to have a very good answer for. Okay, let’s take the evolution of the East Village in New York for a second. It used to be all for that city. It used to be a very different place. And now, you know, it’s more touristy than it was but not as touristy as maybe the West Village. It’s wild watching the evolution of downtown New York. But for me when I’m reading, you’re sort of emotional map of Houston. I bounced back and forth between thinking your characters want to be there without a doubt, and thinking, Oh, no, they really want to leave and they haven’t figured it out. And I’m wondering if that isn’t just part of the narrative tension, right, like, but is that also part of you?

That’s absolutely a part of it, you know, and I think that I’m someone who has a deep love for Houston, like deep love for the city, but it is a love without ambiguities. And then it’s not a love without challenges. And it’s not a love without a cognizance of the many different ways that the city can just be really tough for folks, right. And this is even before getting into like the Texas of that. All right, right. I think that while I was writing Family Meal, and quite a lot of ways, Cam felt like a character to was looking for a home. And TJ, at the outset, at least felt like a character who was looking to leave. And it was interesting to me to take the same place the city of Houston and to make a map of it across the narrative, but also to make a map of it across each of these characters respective emotional arcs. TJ is ultimately someone who is comfortable where he is, and to, or is pushed by, Cam is pushed by the many different folks that are and his ecosystem of relationships to find it themselves to really ask like, what do I want? Cam is asking similar questions, but through and from like a different place, that have these characters that are quite different from one another asking the same questions and attempting to tell a story in a way that just me generally like in a narrative, I’m not particularly interested in answers like that doesn’t really matter. Like I don’t I don’t need a solution. I don’t need a conclusion like, I don’t care about that. But I am interested in questions. And I am interested in questions that create more questions because that feels like a conversation. And I’m of the mind that Family Meal from draft to draft. It’s an evolution of questions of what does it mean to be a friend? Or what can it mean to be a friend? What can a family look like? What can a family in flux look like? What can a friendship in flux look like? How does these things impact our senses of who we are? Who are we when we don’t have like a defined map of how to be or who we’re told to be someone important in our life? With whom we’ve come to define ourselves alongside of if they’re no longer there? In one capacity or another, then where does that put us? What questions and what changes? Are we ourselves forced to make an order to fill that void? if we so choose to fill that void? Or do we create a space and allow for new and more possibilities? None of these questions have static answers. But I think these are all questions that each of us have the lads interesting to me that feels like a narrative that I want to spend time with.

Memorial was an incredibly assured book, Family Meal actually feel slightly more mature in a way your approach to the city feels a little more mature, there’s a little more room for ambiguity, I’m just I’m thinking of TJ and Ian for a minute, Ian may have driven me around the bend a couple of times, but dude’s got to find his way. Yeah, Family Meal feels more grounded in the discomfort. It’s not to say that there isn’t joy in this book that there’s a lot of joy in this book. But I thought it was kind of fascinating that Cam certainly and TJ certainly I’m just going to focus on them for the moment because I there’s something I’m obviously trying to stay away from, you do a really beautiful thing in this book where, you know, I had moments as a reader where I was really uncomfortable. But I trust you enough to know that if I keep going right? Like the payoff is going to come like whether it’s hope or relief or even just a laugh. You walk this high wire on every single page of family meal. And I really respect that as a reader, because it’s hard to do. It’s really hard to do. So when you’re mapping out a novel like this with all of its complexities and all of its characters and all of its that let’s call it family stuff to the moment, right? You started with Cam and TJ. But how do you move through a draft of this manuscript and the story?

It’s interesting that you say that about discomfort because I hesitate to meet anyone, friend acquaintance stranger and so on whoever who has been deeply comfortable over the course of the last few years and then on the way, I think that, for me, a part of what makes writing interesting a part of what makes a narrative interesting because for one thing, I’m more of a reader or writer, I would always rather be reading so it actually takes a lot to get me to sit down project and write it myself by writing something of it because I would like to read something and I do not see that iteration of that thing there. But part of what makes or what made this particular project both deeply challenging, also held my interests to write over the course of two and a half years or so, was that with each book, to some extent, I’m interested in testing the bounds of like, what I can do or what I feel that I can do and put on the page and stretching that a bit, it looks a certain way for a lot that looked a certain way for Memorial so that in of my writing that book, I felt as if the okay like, I have done an iteration of the things that I think I can do at the level that I think that the story necessitates. But for Family Meal, the wall that I kept running into, and the initial drafts of this narrative about friendship of this narrative, about how our senses of family can change our senses of comfort, can change our sense of public can be seen to be, okay, can change was that I was deeply reluctant, myself as uncomfortable as the last few years had felt to lean into that discomfort, or to even acknowledge that discomfort, to some extent, for fear of those challenges, whether they were structural challenges, whether they were challenges permeated by the state, whether they are emotional challenges overrode the questions of community and of friendship and of hope and of possibility for these characters. I think the turning point for me was realizing that that Venn diagram is, you know, a circle in and of itself, right, like all of these things, make up our experiences on a daily basis. In some ways, the challenges really exacerbate the moments that we do feel euphoria, or we do feel joy, or give us something to lean toward, as far as like possibility and help is an are concerned. So for Family Meal, much of the traffic, I was just like, how much can I fit into, you know, like, Can I continue to fit more things and to this array, and as I drafted, I would watch it expand the scope of experience. And as if though, there was room for more. So I added more, and I kept adding more than I kept adding more, and then the honing of the narrative took place in the shape began, from a literal narrative standpoint, but it also began to feel more honest. And it also began to feel as if it were closer to the experiences that I’ve had, the experiences that my friends have had the questions and the conversations that we were interested, and having. And that’s not a fun place to write from. I won’t say there’s a certainly the long term project that I’ve had the least fun writing. But I really felt and feel as though I told the story that I wanted to, to the maximum effect I could the time, which is always the goal.

I felt like I was reading something really fresh and new. You just said this earlier in the taping where you were talking about writing the thing that you just didn’t experience right, and you wanted that thing. And so you wrote, you put Cam through some stuff. And TJ to an extent as well, but Cam really has an arc that I haven’t really seen in a while in fiction, I mean, he’s got some stuff going on with food and booze and pills and readers will find out where that all kind of stems from. But it was interesting to see that in a really modern narrative. And TJ also like his arc, slightly different from Cam’s, but same thing. It’s like you’re not gonna make it easy for either of these guys. But seeing TJ figure out who he wants to be with, right? And here’s this younger kid. I mean, he’s in his 20s but it’s not a storyline that a kid like him always gets,right. And so I kept being surprised by both of them. And then you bring in, you know, parents, and friends and siblings. And I’m still mad at ferns cousin. But that’s a whole other story.

She didn’t have to do that, you know, how much money do you need. But seeing how all of it comes together, and how much similarity there is, to a certain extent. But Cam and TJ can’t see it. As I’m reading Family Meal, I’m doing sort of the mental map on the craft, right? Because you never get heavy handed, and you’re covering some like grief, and identity. And you know, what a mature relationship may or may not look like? It’s like, what do you have to get out of your system? Right? Like, I am deeply grateful apps were not I was younger, like, I can’t even imagine the horror of the apps. But watching these two kids figure out. And again, by kids, I mean, these guys in their 20s. But they seem really young, in ways that actually Mike and Benson didn’t? I don’t know. And is that because my convincing were a couple living together even though things were not going well, I don’t know, how do you feel about sort of where these sets of characters fit on a continuum, Bryan Washington continuum.

In some ways, I would hope that if a reader good had spent time with Memorial also spends time with Family meal, sees or maps, respective protagonists in relation to one another. Family Meal feels more complex, or there is an additional layer of complexity, I do think that with Memorial, it felt important to me to allude to some of the challenges that each of the characters facing individually, which is a Mike and Benson on whether it is racism and dating, whether it is body image challenges, whether it’s mental health challenges, or it’s just the challenge of being, you know, queer person of color in the world, right. But I was really reticent with Memorial to lean too much into those chapters, largely because I didn’t want them to supersede the story, I was telling those challenges superseding the narrative of itself. But also, I think, I’ve just gotten better at my job with Family Meal so that I’m more comfortable, or I’m finding that the risk for me of not including those challenges is not as high as the risk of telling a dishonest narrative, or wasting a reader’s time, and only alluding to the brightness or leaning really far into the light at the expense of challenges that just do exist for a lot of folks and these communities. So I think that Cam and TJ, in many different ways are juggling challenges, whether it’s mental health challenges, whether it is relationship challenges, whether it is socio economic challenges, whetherstructural challenges in the way that they do because that’s just the way it feels right now. You know, but even in the midst of that, I’m always of the mind that at least in my work, at least in you know, the projects that I want to spend time with, I don’t know that there needs to be a positive outcome for every character and part of a Family Meal there certainly isn’t. But allowing for the promise of possibility, not only the promise of possibility, necessarily, but allowing each character, the benefit of the doubt, and the ability to change their minds. And the ability to chart a new path if they want to, or the ability to come back into the fold if they want to or just out if they want to like that’s the sort of narrative If that I’m most amenable toward because that, in a lot of ways, feels true to I mean, there’s so many texts that I’ve read where that promise of possibility or that promise of hope, whether implied or explicit, changed my own life. And, you know, it had a tangible and a palpable impact not only on the story, but also on myself. So writing, family meal with that, in mind gave me a tangible goal, so to speak, in the midst of writing a project for which the models and the cops were like a little bit more anomalous for me. But it also gave me something to write toward, even if I necessarily know exactly what that would look like for each of the characters.

I mean, for me, as a reader, I wanted to be in this world, mostly because I was worried about Cam, slightly less worried about TJ only because I felt like he had a little, maybe he didn’t make all the best decisions. But he had a little more grounded because he has mom and the business and he has him is a little more unmoored. And I was slightly worried in a way that I didn’t feel like I had to be worried for TJ, but I was invested in both of them. And I was invested in wanting to know that someone might be okay isn’t the same thing as wanting to read a happy story where you know, things are going, right. It’s like wanting someone to like, we all meet people in our lives, you know, actual off the page people right where you want them to be okay, but you don’t know if it’s gonna happen or not. And really, it’s out of your hands like, everyone’s an adult here, right? There’s this expectation that I think some readers have where it’s like, either, you have to have nothing but trauma, I wanted to watch these two guys figure out where they might go next. And it wasn’t a clean, it’s not like a dotted line. And they’re just going to do following the little steps, right? I want to sit in a room with them, I want to sit at the table with them. I don’t necessarily need to be in a car with them. And I say that respectfully, but you understand what I mean? Like there are times where it felt very sort of, oh, you should have because you can really write my friend. I really appreciate in family meal that I’m sitting with these really vibrant, like way lively characters that is not phrased well, but you understand what I’m trying to say like, this world is pulsing with life, and with a point of view, and everyone is a distinct entity. And I just, I have some love for Bri, I have some love for that woman. And I was not expecting her to pop back in the way she did. And I’m very happy that you did that. And how much of that is you letting everyone sort of have their term, driving the story, as it were versus this is where we are. I mean, I get that you’re wrestling with these big ideas of time and place and belonging, and you know who gets erased and who doesn’t. But these characters are amazing. as messy as they are, they’re brilliant. I really love them a lot. I don’t think you could deliver a book like this if you didn’t love them, too.

I think it would be challenging to write. When I was working on the novel, and you know, particularly when I was starting writing male characters were more akin to types than actual people that I was hesitant to allow room for that messiness. And I was hesitant to allow space for characters to make mistakes or more aptly to make the sort of mistakes that in the US at this time, it can be quite difficult to find your way back from I found myself eventually asking why I felt so hesitant to do that. Because these things were too close to life as it’s actually lived. Because this would make for a narrative that on the writing end, at least would feel unwieldly big unwieldy, because I didn’t know where it ultimately would go. And with those questions in mind I find myself, noting that, you know, that’s more often than not the sort of book that I want to read, you know, the narrative does feel. So it is akin to actually, maybe having happened to someone, the narrative does feel as if though, I don’t know where it’s gonna go, I don’t know what these people are gonna do, I just hope it works out for them, right? Like, I feel so strongly for them that I hope that they’re able to find a way to make things work out, even if I don’t know that they will. That’s the level of investment that I really hold dear with any text that I’m reading. It became important to me eventually, to try and map that for these characters, and particularly the characters who were thinking of Cam, TJ, Kai and know, specifically, that didn’t and don’t have concrete, culpable, not models at arm’s length for who to be, or how to be something that, you know, I talk with my friends, like a good deal about, particularly the queer ones is a way in which like, a lot of our models that like we have access to for what does or can it look like to be us in our late 30s, early 40s, early 50s, early 60s, and so I’m like, what does that look like? What can fit until we see that trajectory? Like quite a lot of us don’t and can’t, for a multitude of reasons. But the question still remains for us, right? Like, what does that look like? What can it look like, even if you don’t have a model for it, that doesn’t excuse the fact that you know, you’re in that situation yourself. And that was the situation that so many of these characters were in. And so it felt like a really unique challenge, for me at least the ability to like superimpose a lot of the questions that are immediate for me,and the folks that care about the communities that I care about onto these characters, and to see where it led them. Right to see where it would ultimately take them because I didn’t know but probably crucially, at least for me on the writing and like, I actively wanted to find out like I wanted to find out. And I found that when and if I’m able to translate that thought that desire of wanting to see like how something is going to end onto the page, then it’s much easier, I think for like a reader to also have that want and that desire. And for those reasons, you know, it was again, like a challenging book to write. But one that I still wanted to sit down and see the answers to even in moments and even in editing portions where characters are really going through it or Cam is having a deeply challenging time or TJ has many questions that have blurry answers if the answers are present for him at all. And moments when Kai is volleying between what possibilities he thinks he has, and his life and certain realities that really lay themselves clear for him that he has control over some others that he doesn’t even, you know, as I was juggling, you know that I sort of wanted to see how it would turn out. And that I think it would hope is something that you know, the books that I most hold dear is also present for those authors.

Yeah, can we talk about some of those books for a second because I’m also getting dangerously close to blurting out something that happens between two characters that made me very happy. And I’m just gonna say it was a moment between Noah and TJ where they were talking about vaguely the future, and I just I really loved that snappy exchange between them. I’m like, Yes, please. More realness, right? More of this. Like, we don’t know it. You did a really nice thing with the dialogue. So I’m not giving anything away. It’s just a really nice moment. But I do want to talk about literary influences because I feel like you have a really clear voice. I’ve read all of your books, and you have a very, very clear voice to me. But I do think you pull influences from men name in new places, and I just want to hit some of those.

You mentioned a little bit earlier, Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson was really important to me as I was writing this particular book and her work is in was really important to me. Banana Yoshimoto like she changed my life. Kitchenand her work more generally like are extremely important. To me, the work of Jesmyn Ward is really important to me the work of, and I read it a little bit later in the drafting process of Sang Young Park, a book called Love in the Big City, that felt really crucial to me to read in the midst of writing this particular book, but also just as a person, it was a moment where I thought, wow, like someone is being honest, on the page, right and transferred really masterfully by Anton Hara into English from a Korean original but yeah, it was a texture it was like, wow, like you can be, you know, be honest on the page about challenges that queer folks have, about the ways in which just like being a person can be really challenging process for now. 100 Boyfriends?

Oh, I’m so looking to the new book. Oh, I should actually know, you know, I need to just nag his editor, and have it sent to me, but I’m really looking forward to reading it.

Yeah, that’s a that’s a great book. I mean, another author, Samantha Irby, the way in which she’s able to juggle levity with reality so it just feels as if though you’re with a person. I think just such a difficult and a high bar to manifest alone. Scale, the work of Rumaan Alam is really important. To me, the work of Mary H.K. Choi was really important yoke was really important to me. And as I was thinking through the origins of particular project, I mean, there is, I think, insofar as there is a line that can be drawn of continuity, and of you know, the larger continuum of books that, you know, made Family Mealpossible. It’s that there’s the feeling of a deep care for the characters, the authors are writing about the choices that they’re making, there’s a feeling, it seems, have a deep care for giving them the benefit of the doubt and the ability to have decisions and futures that are malleable. In the same way that, you know, I feel each of us everyday, we’re making decisions that are not set. It’s like an active thing that we’re doing. Like I love a book that does that and because you know, any book is made up of the map of books that have influenced that and inspired and created like a lexicon and a language for it, I felt really lucky to have spent time with those books is on the novel.

It feels like a solar system to me, as you’re describing it. I know we bounce back and forth between using map obviously as a sort of reference point for all of the influences that a writer pulls in, but it really feels like a solar system. Because I know sort of where these writers in these books kind of having read your work, like I can see. You know, some are a little more foregrounded, I’ve always been quite fond of Banana Yoshimoto. So I’m delighted. You know, whenever you mention her, I get really excited that she’s been able to, I mean, you’re a kid from Houston. I’m just like, rock on, and this is the same hair from the cover. But if you haven’t seen Kitchen, like yes, this is the haircut.

I don’t know, I think that, you know, it’s one of like, the really lovely and unpredictable and joyous, which I use not haphazardly, things about like, itself is like you don’t know like, who’s gonna read it, you don’t know where it’s gonna go. Like what it’s gonna do. I mean, so many of the authors whose works have impact tangibly impacted, not only like a literary level, but just like at a trajectory level as far as decisions that I’ve may absolutely were not thinking about me when they were writing it and yet, so that, you know, is really nice. It makes for a really warm feeling.

But for me too, I mean, I read so I can connect right? Like I don’t necessarily want to read the experience, years ago or a couple years ago, I interviewed Ruth Ozeki and she and I had similar sort of backgrounds. And we were reading a lot of like John Cheever and John Updike and stuff like because that’s, you know, that’s what’s rolling around in your parents living room, right. Like, I think there was a copy of Speak, Memory, and there was a lot of like, you know, Michener, you get your hands on what you get your hands on, and where you go from there is kind of up to you. But you know, having that moment where it’s like, oh, yeah, you did that too, right? And when I think of, and, I mean, I love her novels. I really love her novels. But you know, the idea of young Ruth reading the same stuff I was reading and thinking, okay, I guess this is the word meaning. And to see this much larger world now and being able to connect, like, like I said, I’ve been to Houston a couple of times, I would like to see your Houston and at some point. But to be able to connect, right, like reading is an act of connection. It’s a, it’s a way of finding that moment, and like my eyes are getting big just thinking about this. But you know, to be able to find that thing that makes you remember that someone else is a person. And that, like I had so many moments, reading family meal, or it’s like, Yep, I survived my 20s. Oh, Good, glad those are done. Not sure how I survived. But okay, but having that sort of shared experience that shared humanity, even if the detailed right, even if the surface details might be a little different. I’m not sure I would make it working in a bakery. But do I love working in a bookstore? Yes, I do. But like I’ve never done food, or worked in a bar, worked in a bakery or anything like that, because there’s a sort of precision with all of those things that maybe I don’t necessarily live my life in that kind of way, right? Like, my dude can bake, because he can read a recipe and pay attention. And I can cook. Because you can reverse engineer things. And if you make a mistake, it is easily fixed. Whereas with baking, if you make a mistake, maybe not so much like you’re a little more stuck. There’s a sense of comfort, obviously, that comes from food. And it’s not just food, obviously, in the books, but the fact that all of your characters do find their way, it’s not necessarily a pat answer, but everyone does find their way. We just may not quite the way they do it right. It might be a little more obvious for some others did writing Family Meal change you?

That’s an interesting question, because the answer is yes. Okay, explicitly and implicitly hearken back to an earlier answer. I don’t know very many people that have not changed in some capacity over the course of the last few years in fundamental ways, like ways that are inextricable, not only from their being, but their interactions with the world to lay it and to more concrete terms, perhaps one way of talking through it is that I began a version of Family Meal at the very beginning of 2020, like the last version of that in mind, and I got about 10,000 words, and that I was comfortable with and that I thought made emotional sense. That made structural sense, okay. And in the fall of that year, so much change had occurred not only for me, but in the world around all of us many of the roles that quite a lot of people may have thought where I couldn’t bend, unbending rules revealed themselves not to be roles at all, many of the structures or many of the ways of being that were thought to have been implied or implicit unnecessarily revealed themselves not to be any of those things at all and reveal themselves for some people were a there are other folks who knew these things by way of lived experience by way of just the ways in which they moved through the world. And I think that a change that I navigated in the midst of writing the book was being or becoming someone who was more open to messiness and possibility, which isn’t to say that there was a fair amount of mess in my life prior to that, like, that is not what I need to, you know, to offer to the world in this podcast. But I think that the question of Oh, like, there are so many possibilities, you know, like, oh, like, there are many different ways that a person is or can be, oh, I can change my mind about this, this relationship doesn’t have to be this way does have to look this way. Like, it really doesn’t. As you change as we change how we move through the world that can change to like, oh, you can do that. These are questions that I was asking in the immediate term along side, millions of other folks presumably. And they altered not only the literal arc of the book, but also the emotional part of the book. And it was only after one that, you know, I recognize that these are questions that needed my attention, in my own life does that nothing would have ended up itself that I was able to return to the project, with the sense that okay, this is actually honest, right? And initial drafts, like, not really thinking of like, is this good? Or like, is this bad and those initial stages, but like, oh, like, I can see the world, as I’ve experienced it, around me and the communities that I care for, whether they’re shared or parallel to mine, or like, Oh, this is something that feels as though you know, it is honest in that way. And I think that that is the point where I thought, okay, like this, I see what this could look like. And I see what I want it to look like. And I know what I would like to at least try to attempt with the story and with these characters.

Yeah, you did more than attempt. We got all of the things in this and I really I love Family Meal. I cannot wait for readers to meet cam and TJ and everyone else and little shout out again to Bree. She’s great.

I’m glad that you mentioned her and you know, give love to her because she was a really important character to meet, to give her the arc that she ultimately has.

As you did, and it paid off. And she the whole thing. I just I’m so, so excited for readers to dive in to family meal and not leave. I’m telling you, you are not going to be able to put it down even when stuff gets tricky and complicated. I still wanted to know what happened next. So Bryan Washington, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. And hey, if you haven’t read Memorial, if you haven’t read Lot, go back and find those two because they are amazing, Bryan, thank you.

Oh, god, thank you so much for having me about this is like, this is like a joy and so so great.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve really been looking forward to this show. Curtis Chin is a documentary filmmaker. He’s also one of the founders of the Asian American writers workshop, which, if you know the AAWW, they are a fabulous resource. If you don’t know them, you should know them. And now he’s written a memoir, called Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant because Curtis grew up in Detroit. And I want to start with Detroit. Because, you know, Detroit.

Curtis Chin

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve been so looking forward to this interview as well. Yeah, Detroit, one of the great American cities, iconic, not just, you know, during his heydays, but also decline and growing up there. You know, it was the best childhood for me, even though this was the 80s. And I always talk about this how, like, you know, the auto industry was dying at that time, cracked something about AIDS, you know, it was about to hit the city. I personally knew five people murdered by the time I was 18 years old. But at the same time, we had this fabulous Chinese restaurant, which, you know, my family was there, we had great Chinese food. I just love my childhood. And, you know, I think that sometimes Detroit gets a bad rap. And so definitely one of the things I wanted to do with this book was show a different side of it is that yes, we did have a lot of difficulties in that era and continue to have difficulties, but at the same time, it’s still a great American city.

And as I spent a couple of years in Chicago, I grew up on the East Coast. And I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles now. But I spent a couple of years in Chicago, and the Midwest is a very different place. It is a very, like, I spent all of my childhood sort of running back and forth between Boston, New York and DC. Yeah, Chicago was an eye opener for me. So whenever I get to talk to someone who grew up in the Midwest, I’m kind of fascinated.

You know, it’s really interesting, because, you know, oftentimes you’re asked to define who you are like, what kind of writer are you? Right? Like, a writer, you’re Asian writer, whatever. And, to me a large degree, I think of myself more as a midwestern writer.

Yeah, let’s talk about that for a second. Because I know you’ve been sort of floating around this idea for a bit. And I think that’s really important.

You know, oftentimes, when you think of the Asian American experience, you think of the west coast or the East Coast or Hawaii, you don’t really think of the flyover states. And, you know, for my family, which has been there since the late 1800s. I mean, I jokingly say that my grandpa, my great great grandfather had gone from Canton, China, to Canton, Ohio, before realizing there weren’t Chinese people there, and leading up to Detroit. Now, Detroit in the late 1800s, there wasn’t even a Ford Motor Company, let alone Motown music. And I keep thinking like, wow, that was, it was still a pretty French city at that time. You know, there were very few black people, what was that would have been like for, you know, them as they came in, as they saw the great migration come in as they went through the Depression, you know, what I mean, and all these historical things. And so, I just like to remind people that, you know, there have been Asian Americans in this country, all parts of this country for many, many years.

You know, when you say your family has been here for 100 years, it does make me think of Ava Chin’s Mott Street. Her family, similarly has been here for, you know, 100 plus years and same thing, and yeah, people forget all the time, Asian America has been a thing. And you okay, it took us a minute to get organized. And also, you know, my family, my mom came to the states in the 60s, and my dad has always been here. His family’s always been here. Yeah, so our experience is slightly different. I really, I so appreciate families like yours, where you’ve got this, like, really long history, because I’m still like, technically, I’m still first gen on one side of my family, you know, and having those connections is just kind of a beautiful, gorgeous thing. I’m also thinking of The Family Chao, that novel by Samantha Chang, similarly set in a Chinese restaurant, only in Wisconsin instead.

Like, I think about my, you know, the fact that my mom’s grandparents are buried here in America, you know, I mean, it’s just kind of cool that, you know, that that’s where our roots are there to that deep.

Okay, all of your siblings have names that begin with C, which I kind of love, but at the same time, like in our house, probably we would all just get called by the wrong name. And there were only two of us.

But other Asian families did that, too. Like my husband is Korean and they did it.

I had no idea. Now we were just so my brother actually has an Anglo first name, because my parents were like, Yeah, you know, Japanese men’s names are a little harder to spell in the US. And I’m like, okay. It was also a really long time ago in Massachusetts. I think the world has changed a little bit. I do want to talk about your parents, though, because your mom and dad got married when they were very young. They went from mainland China to Hong Kong, which at the time is a really big leap. Right? Like this is in the 60s that your parents are doing this. And you’ve got other family that’s already here, right?

My dad was here, my mom is the one…

It’s your mom’s family. I’m so sorry. Yeah, my bad.

She escaped mainland horrific circumstances because her family had already been in the United States, like, similarly, both sides had been here in the late 1800s. But because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, oftentimes it was just the men over here, and they would send back money to China. In my mom’s case, her side of the family decided to stay because, you know, they had a very nice house there, they were now moving up the social ladder there. So they stayed there, the women stayed there, you know, but the men were here, on my dad’s side of the family, they came over completely. And so my dad was born here. So in some ways, people might even say I’m a 1.5 generation or two.

I yeah, I just… how do you say, your family has been here for 100 years.

That’s why I don’t use that term. I actually just say my family has been here since the late 1800s. Because I think for Asian Americans, we did not have the privilege of bringing our families over to stop that count. And so therefore, it’s more important for me to establish how long we’ve been here. So I say, I think it’s a more accurate representation of my family’s experience in America to say how long we’ve been here.

That’s one of the things I really love about the way you tell your story. You guys at one point, though, go to the suburbs, it’s a little messy, but you’ve got grandparents living with you and cousins. I mean, like you’re doing thing you become first and only in your classroom. It is the experience that it is.

Yeah, I mean, we moved from a more diverse school to one that was probably 95, if not more 97%. White, you know, and so you have to develop these skills right to fit in, thankfully, I was able to do it, because I grew up in this Chinese restaurant. And one of the things that people often asked me, given the title of my book, so what did you learn Chinese restaurant. And I say the first thing I learned was, parents often times tell their kids don’t talk to strangers. My parents told me the exact opposite. They said, talk to strangers, talk to you and who they were talking about, with the customers sitting in our dining room, because my mom didn’t graduate high school, and my dad went to community college for maybe semesters. They didn’t know what life was like outside of that those four walls like in terms of opportunities for us. But anytime someone came into our restaurant who had a really cool job, my dad would call all six of his kids to run over and barrage these customers with questions like, Well, how did you get your job? How much money do you make? You know, do you like your work? And because of that, I grew up very comfortable, you know, talking with people who are different than me, and that’s why I love meeting people. And so going to the suburbs, even though it was different, I felt equipped enough. The challenge, right, even though there, you know, I was facing discrimination. You know, like kids calling you names and stuff like that, I figured out a way to to, you know, sort of succeed. And you know, like I said in the book, you know, becoming class president, President National Honor Society, fulfilling the model minority myth in a lot of ways.

Yeah, you and I were, I think, probably around the same age, when that Time Magazine cover came out, the one that you’re talking about in the book, and I still like, it makes me itch. I still just thinking about that cover makes me itch. I’m like, great. Now someone’s gonna expect me to learn how to do math, or like, physics or something. I was the kid who was doing like all of the APs in the humanities, like, can I just go deal with words and story? And can you please just leave me alone? And I just remember having nothing but dread in my stomach, when that came as like, oh, man, this is none of this is good.

I mean, it’s bad enough, your parents are probably pressuring you, right? Like,

Yeah, I had it, I have to admit, my parents were a little more quiet about that, it was just clear that there was an expectation and that, you know, you would just meet the expectation. Let’s put it this way. My brother was good at music. So he took music lessons, but then everyone realized I had no musical talent. And I was released from having to do any kind of piano. No, no. So I just went and did my own thing. And it was quite much better for me, because I can’t carry a tune to say my life, but your parents are really vivid on the page. Your grandma is a little unforgettable.

I can share a story about my grandmother.

Yeah, I would like to hear more stories about your grandma, because she’s slightly terrifying.

So anyway, there’s this whole question of like, how do you write about family? And I had resigned myself that I was just going to be as honest as I could to my own memory, right, good or bad. And so as you say, my grandmother was quite a terror. I mean, cause she was growing up and I know, most of it earlier this spring. I was out, doing some pre readings for the book, right? And I was in Texas, Austin, Texas. And organizers get to the restaurant early and they say, Hey, can you meet us early? I’m saying Oh, yeah, sure. So I go downstairs to the street and I wait for my Uber. And there’s this old Chinese lady’s standing on the street corner, and she turns around and she sees my sweatshirt and it says Detroit vs. Everybody. And she asked me, oh, are you from Detroit? And I go, Yeah. And she, we start having this conversation. And it turns out that her mom was best friends with my grandmother. And she’s like saying all these stories about my grandmother saying, she was such a nice woman, she taught us how to drink American coffee. She always kept candy in her pocket and stuff like that. And, you know, I’m looking at my clock wondering where’s my Uber. And eventually, I just said, Look, I totally accept the fact that you have these great, wonderful memories about my grandmother. But I don’t I mean, she was nice to plenty of people, just not to me. And, you know, I quickly got in the car, but then a few days later, I realized that, you know what maybe that was an emissary, from my grandmother from the grave, telling me, you know, like, I had misrepresented her that I’m being unfair to her. So if you’re gonna write about your family, right, what you feel, you know, because whether you like it or not, even if they’re dead, they’re going to come out of the grave and tell you, you know that you got them wrong.

So, yeah, there’s that. What do your siblings think of the book?

Nobody’s read it yet, only a sister in law has read it. So I don’t know.

That’s fair. And I mean, I’m always more curious about the sibling relationship than I am about the parent child, because siblings can just be so wildly divergent, you grew up in the same family, but you have wildly different memories of stuff. And I’m always kind of fascinated. It’s like a mini sociological experiment, only it’s in your living room.

And you become completely different people. When I announced this book sale to my family, you know, on a zoom session immediately after, one of my siblings texted me right away and said, You made me the villain of the book, didn’t you? Well, I thought to myself, This is exactly why I would make you the villain because whenever I have happy news, you always have to turn it into something against you. It’s, we talked about it since and I have reconciled and I said, look, it’s my book. I’m the hero. I’m the one that has the journey. I’m the one that grows and learns. I don’t think I present myself as a perfect person either.

Oh, you definitely don’t. That’s one of the things I appreciate. Because I mean, I was not expecting you to say, Well, I’m a baby, Alex Keaton, from Family Ties only Chinese American, like, you were a baby Republican, which is totally, you know, it makes perfect sense for where you were going with everything else. But I wasn’t expecting that at all. And watching that sort of pathway from you being I’m going to assume you were not wearing bow ties. I could be wrong. Oh, you were, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. Okay, so you had your thing, but you’re, you know, high achieving in class and class president, and you’re doing all of these things. And you’re also working in the restaurant. Let’s not leave that out. So you’re doing all of this stuff. And trying to figure out sort of who you are and where you fit into things. And then we have Vincent Chin and the murder of Vincent Chin. How do you process all of the stuff that you’re trying to do as this member of the model minority, right, which is a phrase we didn’t even choose for ourselves, right? Like it was applied to us. You’re essentially doing it, though. I mean, you’re rocking Your life and everything else. But…

I think that part of the reason why I was Republican is because one of the accusations against Asian Americans back then more so still today was that we’re not very loyal Americans, right, that we have divided, you know, allegiances and things like that, you know, I was going to prove otherwise, I was going to get out American, my fellow basically wrapped myself around this patriotism. And so it was a cover, and it did work in that area, because the area that we eventually moved to was a middle class, upper middle class neighborhood, you know, in very Republican at that time. I mean, it’s has since shifted, interestingly, but you know, back then it was definitely a Republican stronghold, and I fit right in that way. And then as you mentioned, Vincent Chin murder. For those people who don’t know, it was a vicious hate crime against a Chinese American whose killers thought he was Japanese American, and they killed him with a baseball bat. And sadly, the judge only fined them $3,000. They never served a single day in jail. And it was a pivotal moment for me in my life. Because, up until that point, I really thought I would just carry on the family business. You know, I wouldn’t be a Chinese waiter for the rest of my life because it wasn’t a bad gig. I mean, you know, me was there. I had all the free food I wanted, I mean, was a very popular restaurant. I think that one of the reasons why and this gets into why, you know, it was so important for me to find other writers to start a group like the Asian American writers workforce, was that, you know, when Vincent was attacked, we found out the very next morning because my coworker was his best man. And so I checked the papers trying to find out like, What were they saying about It, you know, but nobody reported on it. Nobody reported on it for 12 days, right? Even when he was in the hospital, even when he died, No one wrote anything about it. So then one story appears, okay, it was a good story granted, but after that story, another 10 Months go by for another story. And I honestly believe that, you know, if more had been known about Vincent, or even just the Asian American community in general, I highly doubt that the judge would have given that type of sentence. You know, if people had seen us as people, or as members of the Detroit community, I don’t think the church would have done that. And so that’s why it’s been so important for me, throughout my life, to think about ways to increase opportunities for people to understand who we are, and where we come from, in all its complexities.

I grew up outside of Boston. And I don’t remember when I first learned about Vincent Chin, like, I don’t remember not knowing about Vincent Chin. But going back and looking at the media coverage, there’s no way I saw it. So I don’t know who told me about it, or when I like, but I honestly don’t remember not knowing about his murder, and being really aware that the whole thing was just outrageous. But it’s so weird, because obviously, we didn’t have the internet the way we like, we did not have the kind of information we have now. And it’s really interesting going back and you did a documentary film called Vincent Who? and going back and looking at, there’s an original documentary, you need to watch. going back and looking at it all these years later, is the weirdest kind of time travel, if you’re Asian American, and I remember seeing it when it first came out. Because that’s the beauty of living close to a college town. You get to see everything, but going back as an adult, and having decades between my original viewing and seeing it now and then seeing it’s not something you want to let go of. But it’s also not easy to process even now, and especially coming out of sort of what we came out of during the peak of COVID, right? Where there was suddenly another explosion of anti Asian American violence, especially against old people like what are you doing, smacking an old person in the head, like what is wrong with you, but to see this kind of love in the community, right and seeing people take that and do something with it? Instead, like there’s a lot of mutual aid that has come out in recent years, that’s been really terrific to see, like you’ve built communities around your films, you’ve done some very cool events. I mean, Dear Corky. That’s such a great project. I was a little surprised, though, when you deliver the memoir, because I didn’t realize you had time. I mean, seriously, you’ve been doing so much. When did you start actually working on the memoir like, when did you sit down and say, Okay, I’m going to finally do this, because a lot of us have been walking around going, well, he’s gonna do it someday. And then suddenly, here it was, and it was kind of like, Oh, okay.

Thank you for those compliments. But, you know, actually, I sold it as a summer 2024 book. They actually bumped it up after they got my first draft. So I actually thought I would have more time to write the book. But it’s a good compliment. Do you know what I mean? That they really loved it. And you know, I had been working on it the way I think about it, it’s actually been working for a while, I’ve been working on a memoir for a while, but about 10 years ago, I started thinking that I should write one because specifically, my siblings were having kids. And, you know, after my dad passed away, you know, my family, we all left Michigan, and they moved out all to the Bay Area. And when they started here, mom, even my mom, because my parents were in a car accident. And sadly, you know, my mom couldn’t continue the business. And so my brother who’s out there, Chris, who’s a doctor, you know, was in the best position to provide that care for her. And so she moved out there, you know, I had to go back home and sell the family business, the restaurant, all that kind of stuff. That’s actually, you know, when I switched and made Vincent Who? because I was looking for a personal project. And then, you know, when they started having kids, it made me start thinking maybe I should write some of these stories down. Because, you know, we have such a rich history of Michigan, you know, in our family, and these kids are not going to own anything about it. And so, I started writing that memoir, and that took me a number of years, I did the typical thing of trying to find an agent not having much success, get wonderful feedback, saying they love the writing. They love the voice. They love the setting. They just didn’t think they could sell it. And then what happened was COVID, right? Shut down the country at George Floyd being murdered. You had the rise of reporting of anti Asian hate crimes. And from that, I sat back down and said, you know, maybe I need to reimagine what my memoir would be about or should be. And that’s when it became much more about identity, you know, the coming out process, the events in story, prior to it, that first memoir that I was working on was just crazy stories about my, my mean grandmother, my grandfather, who ran the Chinese mafia, the you know what I mean, like, all this young kid story, but, you know, after COVID, and the rise of anti Asian hate, I upped the age to cover High School in college, you know, when you’re a little bit older, a little more cognizant of things, but it’s also a more difficult memoir to write, it’s not as fun because you get into darker territories that you may not be ready or think that you need to sort of understand or to reflect on. So, you know, so the version that you see is really the one that I started, you know, right around COVID, when I pitched it to those agents that that were close to signing me but needed a little bit more, I immediately got multiple offers.

From there, the stakes are higher. I mean, the stakes are higher. And I do think it’s easy sometimes for folks who are not part of the Asian American community to look and say, well, it’s this monolith, right? And I’m like, actually, yeah, hi, there’s all sorts of parts to this community. And you know, sometimes they all work together. And sometimes we kind of look at each other and go, I’m sorry, what I mean, I really appreciate the fact that you really dig in on your coming out story. I mean, we don’t get a lot of gay, Asian American stories. I mean, certainly, Alexander Chi has done a lot of great work, but you guys can’t be the only ones in the room. But I think it’s important. I do. Like, I think it’s important for younger people to be able to see that it is possible, you know, to have the life that you want to have, wherever you might be. And sometimes I think that feels a little daunting, especially where you know, the point we’re at now, in our culture in our society, and you do not leave anything out. Let’s think you’re really honest. And I think you might have been a handful in your 20. I think we were all animals in our 20s you’re really honest. And I appreciate that as a reader, but was there anything you went back later and thought, Oh, God, why did I put that in?

I don’t know. Because I haven’t thought about that yet. I’m sure there’s some stuff. But I also felt like if I’m going to be writing a memoir, I need to be honest. I think that the other reason why it might have been okay for me to write this stuff was because I feel like I’m a different person. You know, that was 30 odd years ago, I feel like hopefully, I’ve changed. Like even the stuff about being this this right-wing Republican enables not a very nice guy in high school. I mean, I can look back on it and laugh on it a little bit. I will say that yesterday, I actually had this really, really wonderful opportunity. I was invited by this group here in Southern California called AAPI PFLAG, its parents of lesbians, gays, it’s the only official chapter, right, which is specifically Asian American. And it was so wonderful to be in that room with all those people. And I deliberately chose a story about my mom. Because I felt like I wanted these parents of gay kids to know that we think about them, you know, we are going through these tough struggles ourselves as we’re trying to come out. We’re not ignorant of the fact that they are also struggling to, you know, that this is something that affects our whole family. And I feel like maybe that’s something that’s unique about the Asian American experience is that I don’t know if it’s stereotype or whatever. But I feel like we think about the impact of our individual decisions on the rest of our family a little bit more. Right, like in terms of the life choices that we make.

I think that’s definitely true for some of our families. I might be leading with my chin a little more. Yeah, I kind of am. But I think I do. I think that’s true for a great many people. I just I hesitate to hit us.

Or maybe immigrants.

Yeah, immigrants. Definitely. Yeah, without a doubt without, without a doubt.

Because you think about all the sacrifices that your parents make to come over to this country. Right. And, you know, I definitely, always thought about that, particularly because we had so many kids, and I knew tight for us, you know, and that’s why I tried to grow up really fast and be independent and like pay my way through college. I mean, I’m sure my parents would have found a way to help me pay for college, but I didn’t want to ask them because I knew they had, you know, several other kids that were paying College two, it just it just seemed like they were working so hard already that if I could just ease their burden a little bit by paying my own, you know, tuition and room and board. It wasn’t you know,

Did all of you go to school in Michigan?

No, one graduate from Loyola in Chicago and graduated from Yale. Another one graduated from Boston University and the Michigan. So it’s quite expensive. Those selfish ones who went out of state. That’s, that’s what the states state school.

I have a little brother, I only have a little brother. So you know, it was it was kind of different experience for us. But I want to go back to the restaurant for a second. Because part of me Boston’s Chinatown is like two blocks. Right? Like, you know, we had a Chinese restaurant that was huge. When we were coming back from the airport, it was a huge treat, or like, you know, and it was very American Chinese. You know what I’m talking about? All props. There is a Chinese restaurant in almost every town in America, you kind of love it. There’s only so much sweet and sour chicken, you can eat right? When it’s done a certain way. So but I want to talk about your family’s restaurant because there’s also a one dish that you learn to make that I’ve never actually seen on a menu. So I don’t know if it’s like your family’s thing or what but I we need to talk about the chicken.

Yeah, it’s a it’s a great dish. It’s people in Detroit, like the claim is one of our own.

That’s why I’ve never seen it because it sounds amazing.

When you’re in Detroit, I will take you there. It’s a very simple dish. I mean, you know, it’s comfort food, basically what it is, it’s a breaded a filet of white chicken, you know, deep fried, served with a brown gravy with Asian sauces in it and served with a bowl of white rice. Now, there’s a light garnish of crushed almonds, and maybe a few slivers of water chestnut, but it’s a very simple dish. Every Chinese restaurant in the Detroit area has it. But really, like you said, you know, a few scattered places. I found it. But really no, it’s really a Detroit thing. You know, I was actually approached by America’s Test Kitchen to do a episode of their podcast about that. And so that’s what I’m working on. And during that I actually came up with a theory because my grandmother used to say that we invented the dish. Now I just okay, whatever, because we weren’t the most popular Chinese restaurant. Right, right. Like, I always tell people get some and ask people, How many egg rolls Do you think we sold over the 60 years that we own the business and I always tell them, we sold over 10 million egg rolls, means you’re very popular restaurant, right? So when they say that I was like, Okay. And so this dish, in terms of researching how it came about, the theory that I’m sticking with is that, you know, in the late 50s, the city of Detroit tried to destroy the old Chinatown, right make with a freeway, at the same time, they destroyed this era called Black Bottom, you know, Paradise Valley, where the African American culture was centered. And because of the destruction of those two neighborhoods, the two communities had to relocate. And they found themselves in the caste corridor, another poor area of town. And when our restaurant relocated, they had to adapt the menu to have more dishes that were appealing to different communities. And the Blacks, you know, we’re from the south, you know, it’s part of the great migration. And in some ways, I make the case that this dish sort of came about as a as a union of the two different communities now in side by side with each other because essentially, it’s fried chicken. You know, it’s all food.

Good. Korean fried chicken. I mean, Japanese karaage, like when that’s done well,

It’s all great. Ya know, and it’s a delicious dish that people would come in and order all the time. And it’s just like, I really am surprised that it just never really took over, took off. I mean, maybe, you know, maybe in another life, I’ll do that. I will rise.

Yeah, it’s wild to me to the way people respond to Chinese food in the states. Like it’s very American Chinese here, unless, you know, you’re at a specific kind of restaurant. And it’s wild to me, I’ve been really fortunate and I’ve been able to eat like Taiwanese quite a lot. And Taiwanese is sort of this hybrid of Japanese, Sichuan and Korean. Oh, really? Yeah. It’s trippy. It’s really trippy. But my partner when I took him to Taipei a number of years ago, and we were eating he was like, oh, oh, now I understand. I’m like, it’s kind of mind blowingly great. But you know, he was raised on Chinese food in New Jersey. Yeah, yeah. That’s a totally different food experience. Right. And I just part of me is very envious of you as a child being able to eat sort of across just love like the whole dimension right. Can Chinese food it’s like we, as a community, the stamp was put on it, right? Like the fact that you and I were just talking about almond chicken and you’re based in Los Angeles now like, Have you even in Monterey Park? Like have you seen that on a menu? You haven’t and like, I certainly have not seen it on the East Coast either. So I’m kind of like…

So many wonderful dishes. God, if I could only, I could go back to that restaurant, like and have a week and just eat all my favorite foods. I would be so happy. You know, obviously the restaurants closed now. But ya know. I just wish I could cook.

Well, it’s also a little bit of that whole Proustian memory thing, right, like taste and smell. It’s so crazy powerful. Like, I mean, my mother used to fry smelts for us. And I love I’m like, I just I love have I tried doing it myself. I have not because frying thing I can’t. I was having this conversation with another writer who can actually cook. And I can’t like I’m so intimidated by frying things. I just said, I need someone else to do it. The combination of just mess and heat and everything else. I knew my limits in the kitchen.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like you almost have to let go. And not overthink it when cooking. Right? Such an organic natural process in some ways. Yeah.

You really can’t cook though. Because it sounds like from the book that you did learn a few things. I’m not just the almond chicken. I’m not sure I would describe you as not being able to cook I’m sorry.

Okay, I’m not. I’m not necessarily a foodie. I can’t do great things. But yeah, I can follow instructions. And, you know, like, if I’m in a baking contest, I can place pretty well. You know, I’m not totally terrible at it. But it but this was, this is one of the revelations in the book was that when I was growing up in the Chinese restaurant, Chinese food was always about big family gatherings, about like, you know, craziness at the table people like, you know, pulling at each other and stuff like that. And that’s what I always thought food was right. But then when I went to college, and I finally found myself oftentimes eating alone, you know, in your own apartment, or person of one, you understand that there’s a different way to sort of respect food, too, right. And I think once I realized that food wasn’t just about pleasing a large group of people, because that was my cooking is that I’d always try to like, take an account with people like everybody. And I tried to make a dish that was appealing to everybody, which ended up appealing to nobody.

How does it feel, after all of these years of sort of building community and being an activist, and I mean, all of these things are stories part of it, right? Like, that’s how we build community. That’s how we get other people to, you know, start participating in new ways and all this. But this is a really different way of telling your story. It’s really intimate. It’s really personal. It’s about to be in the world, Curtis? How’s it feel?

Yeah, I mean, I get scared when you ask me questions like that way, because maybe I haven’t thought about the full implications or how it might reverberate. You know, for me, like you said, community has always been so important to me, maybe because I loved our community so much back in Detroit, because we’re such a small community. And I saw negative things happen to us, it really hurt me. And so I really always wanted to make sure that our community was strong, and could stand up for itself. And so I’ve always been really active in doing things like that. And that’s always brought me so much joy. And, you know, like, even with, with cofounding the Writers Workshop, you know, seeing so many writers come to the door, and have success and to be able to, like, celebrate all of their books and everything. It’s just, I don’t know what we did back then to get things right. But it’s just, it’s just such a joy in life to be able to feel like we’re part of that and to make these things happen for so many people. I just, you know, I don’t know what else to say about that. It’s just, it’s just, I get so many people coming up to me saying, like, oh, I went to the workshop at early stage of my career. It helped me at this pivotal moment. And I just, you know, I was like, Oh, wow, I’m so happy for them. It’s weird now coming to my turn, right, like 30 years after we co founded the group. Now, I don’t really say, Okay, now it’s your turn to have a book. But you know, everything happens for a different reason. And the other thing too, is that, because I’ve spent so many years, you know, helping community. I feel like so many people are coming at turning around and recognizing that and offering to help me. So for instance, the organizers of Stop AAPI Hate approached me and said, Hey, we want to help support the launch of your book, we’re going to throw an event for you in in Los Angeles. When does that happen? Right, like, you know, or like, you know, there’s a group called the AAPI civic engagement fund, a foundation that some Asian American nonprofits, doing advocacy work, they want to do a launch a pre kickoff launch the night before my book comes out for all their members. So it’s going to be all these nonprofits around The US dinner I mean, like members of it. And so, you know, that makes me feel really great. Because you know, there’s no way you can launch a book. And we talked about this a little bit before we got on the air is that it is so hard now to get people to come to readings and to like, generate excitement. But I’m hoping, you know, I’ve got a 30 city tour just in October, November alone. But so many of those readings have been adopted by local community groups and local organizers who are saying, No, we’re going to bring up the community. And so they’re estimating as much as 100 or 200 people at these events. I don’t know if that’s true or not, I even if they had a fraction of those people, I’d be very happy.

I think when you get to see readers connect with books, regardless of where you are, or what the moment is, it’s always I mean, I’ve been a bookseller for a really long time. And it is just so good to see. Yeah, and if there’s six people in the room, or 100 people in the room, it’s just it’s so like, you can feel it. Right? Like, yeah, Zoom was a great thing. And we were all able to do stuff during lockdown that it was helpful. It was really helpful. But you know, when you’re in a room, and again, you’ve done this, you’ve had events for your films and whatnot. Like when you’re in the room, the energy is just…

Like I said, the event yesterday, I’m still thinking about it. I mean, I think about those, you know, it’s interesting, because there was about me 30 or 40 people in the room. Many of them were immigrant parents talking, the difficulties they had, like in terms of when their kids came out, or, or even more specifically, when their kids decided to transition, you know, and how difficult that was for them. Just being in community with them and feeling like, hopefully presenting a positive role model to them, in some ways makes them feel better, because I was there with my husband, you know, who I with for 29 years. And for them to see a stable, queer Asian couple, sitting right next to them, who has a book coming out that’s being celebrated, hopefully, makes them feel good. And so, you know, that felt really, really great.

When you and Jeff met in college. Yeah, that’s a really I mean, yeah, in the context of like, you settled down relatively young, which, you know, not everyone does. I think it’s adorable.

Yeah, no, we have a we have a nice meet cute story. Yeah, we didn’t immediately get together right away. But you know, a few years after I moved off to New York,

While I was about to say you dropped in a really nice sort of, hey, reader, guess what’s gonna happen? It’s very cute in a book, too. Yeah. But to actually, I mean, why not? Because you talk about how Detroit raised you, but New York made you and now you kind of live in Los Angeles? Yeah, no, I don’t think you can live in LA without having an impact. I mean, especially if you’re Asian American, it just LA. Okay, I’m gonna sound a little woowoo. But the energy is a little different, right?

Well, definitely. I mean, when I was in New York, I was writing poetry, right. And it’s a great city for that, because you’re riding the subway, you’re listening different sounds, you’re smelling different things. In LA you’re literally sitting in the car, listening to Ryan Seacrest, and so you’re not going to be writing very many poems about that. And so that’s when I partly switched my genre to on TV and film. Yeah, it’s been fun too. But at the heart of it, I still feel like I’m a poet, because you learn so much about the foundation of writing, not just in language, and sounds in terms of, you know, momentum, all this stuff is all. And I always say to everybody, regardless of what genre you want to write, even if you want to be a grant writer, take a poetry writing class, it will help so much.

I actually keep a really significant set of shelves of poetry at home, because sometimes when you’ve been reading, and I read a lot, like I can’t even tell you how many books I read a year. But sometimes you just need to sit with a couple of poems or a collection of poetry like just as sort of what’s the in between sorbet kind of thing where you just need to kick around a new set of words and a new way of thinking about words.

It strips it down to the language is what it does for me. It reminds you like, these are the building blocks of ideas, you know, and so, yeah, I find it really, you know, really incredibly helpful.

And it doesn’t matter what kind of copy you write, you really should be reading your sentences out loud. I tell that to the writers that we have in house all the time where I’m just like, just read it out loud, because if it sounds weird, when you’re speaking it, it’s going to sound weird to someone reading it. So that’s the fastest way to make a set of edits is to just read it out loud.

I do, I mumble it a bit to myself like when I’m reading, I can hear it but so my copy editor at Little Brown actually wrote back and very nice note to me reading my book, she said Please tell him Mr. Chin. This is a well written fascinating eye-opening memoir. I enjoyed it very much. And people said to me that like, Oh, I didn’t get an note for my copy editor. And it just, it made me think it made me really appreciate because I edit like a poet in the sense of I was thinking about every single word choice. I was thinking about how what was the last word in the sentence, how each paragraph flowed into the next paragraph.

If you have a chance when you get off the road, Safiya Sinclair’s memoir, How to Say Babylon. You she’s also a poet, Cannibal came out in 2016. It’s part of the prize is to be published by the University of Nebraska and it’s if you have a chance the collection, she grew up in Jamaica and she teaches in Arizona now. She feels similarly as you do and going from poetry to memoir, she’s like, well, they’re inseparable to me. But at the same time, like you start with the poetry, and it’s really important. I think there are people who feel like poetry is really inaccessible. And I’m like, No, you don’t. Like, I get it. And we can do the serious classic stuff. Or, you know, there’s also Lucille Clifton. Got, I could just run down list and then we could end up Joy Harjo we could end up doing a whole show. Just you and I riffing on poetry. What’s next, though, for you? I mean, now that you’ve put this book out into the world, I mean, you’ve been doing a little bit of food writing, which I think is great. I’m very excited to hear your episode of America’s Test Kitchen pod.

Oh, I jokingly said to my agents. So this book is divided into three sections of eight stories each because Chinese. I’m very superstitious. There are all kinds of little easter eggs like that in the, you know, Chinese culture. So there are 24 stories in this book. And I jokingly said to my agents, if this book does really well, maybe we can sell another book called leftovers. Of all the books that stories that didn’t make it in I have, like 20 stories that didn’t make sense to me. But you know, then I thought like, well, maybe there’s a second memoir of eight stories in New York, eight in LA, working as a Hollywood writer. But then eight stories back in Detroit, you know, when my dad, when my parents were in the car accident, my dad died, I actually had to go back and figure out what I was going to sell the business. I would love to do that story. I think that might be a little bit too emotionally hard for me to write that story. Yeah. I feel like the, you know, the New York and LA stories might be a little bit easier. But the part about my dad and my, in selling the family business, I don’t know that I probably could write that book. But I think it’ll take me a few years. Because you have to process all that stuff. And I think I’m still a few years away from actually being able to understand that story and its impact on me. But besides that, I mean, we have had interest in turning this book into series, the TV series, obviously with the strike impacting it, but now that it looks like it’s over, maybe there might be some interested with that. And I’ve been writing a lot more articles to I mean, for different publications. As you mentioned, not just some food writing, but also some more political writing with nonfiction. I wrote my article, Bon Appetit, last year got selected for best American food writing pieces I wrote for CNN, I wrote a piece for the Detroit Free Press recently. And so that that’s kind of fun for me, like these short pieces, too. But I’m in the enviable position of actually having opportunities where people are now approaching me and asking me to write things. So that’s good. Making sure this book gets out in the world, I think is my top priority right now. Because, you know, oftentimes, I mean, if you’re gonna spend so many years working on writing the book, you don’t want it to just disappear, right? Like after a little while, and a lot of times is there are lots of really wonderful books out there, well written books, which just don’t find the audience for whatever reason, right? Maybe there wasn’t enough marketing put into it, maybe there was something else going on that distracted people from it. So my goal is to make sure that the audience that I think would like this book can find this book, right, and to make sure that they know about it. And so I’m going to do that, at least for the next year.

But that sounds like a good plan. That sounds like a really good plan.

I’m starting to get interest, even internationally. Like I already did five talks on the book in Germany in the Netherlands. They already heard about the book, and I’ve gotten invited by the US Consulate in Shanghai, to go do a reading out there. I don’t mind traveling internationally. If anybody wants to bring me out there.

I think it all sounds like a very good set of plans. And you know, two months on the road as a start isn’t a bad idea. That would be a really good place to end, Curtis. But I know there’s one other thing because you and I have been talking about this sort of in the background. You had a really specific reason for writing the memoir and wanting to publish it now. And I I’d like to take us out on that note, if you’re cool with that.

You know, it really distresses me that we live in a very divided country right now. We have these silos where we don’t talk to each other. There’s so much anger and I felt like, you know, Chinese restaurants are potentially one of the few places where you can go in and see someone from a different background, racial, socio economic, religious, sexual orientation, whatever. And maybe if you just took the opportunity, because you’re in that same space as someone to start a conversation, you know that maybe, maybe that could give us an opportunity as a country to sort of come back together. I don’t want us to avoid these very important discussions that we’re having right now. Right, it’s critical that we do it. But maybe there’s a way that we can do it in an atmosphere that’s a little bit more learning and a little bit more, you know, positive. And so the way I sort of brought this up as my book is like, you know, come for the girls, but stay for the talk on racism. You know what I mean? And I feel like, if a small way, my book can sort of help give people a point of reference to have conversations. And I feel like I’ve done my small part in terms of being that patriotic American that I always want to be starting from high school.

Yeah. And as a reader of your book, you’ve done that. So I’m really looking forward to other readers discovering what you learned in a Chinese restaurant. So the memoir is Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese restaurant. Curtis Chin, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

Thank you so much.