Year Of The Dragon

Available Now : Amazon , Barnes & Noble

Debbie Chinn's first book, "Dancing in Their Light: A Daughter's Unfinished Memoir," (Strange Fate Publishing, 2022) encapsulated her life as a 'restaurant kid, ' growing up in her family's prominent New York restaurant and Polynesian nightclub, Mah Jong Restaurant, during the 1960s and 70s.

Debbie wondered how she might tell the story of "Dancing in Their Light" in an educational and pictorial way to depict the arc of her family stories and of the defining bicultural moments in U.S. and Chinese civic relationships, in which her family of immigrants played a significant part.

At the same time, Debbie has long been intrigued by the power of art therapy. Music, theatre, and dance have been sources of balm for her, as she describes in "Dancing in Their Light." Moreover, a constant through line in her career as a successful arts CEO has been developing programs that connect art with emotional recalibration.

"Year of the Dragon" is the first in a series of "colorable graphic memoirs" based on the themes and stories of "Dancing in Their Light." It is an homage to Chinese New Year, representing new beginnings.

The series features the extraordinary talents of author and artist Ginna BB Gordon, editor of Debbie's first book, "Dancing in Their Light." A multitalented woman, Ginna is an artist at the core, and has painstakingly rendered the exquisite colorable illustrations in this book by hand, beautifully capturing the essence of Debbie's family's story.

The creators of this volume hope it serves as a fun, educational, and intergenerational activity to inspire you to learn more about the cultures and norms of Chinese New Year, and to give you an insight into how Debbie's family enterprise, Mah Jong Restaurant, grew to become one of the most popular culinary destinations during the gilded age of dining, 1960-1980.

Dancing in Their Light

Available for purchase on Amazon & Barnes & Noble.

Publisher details

Debbie is first-generation Chinese, born and raised on Long Island, New York. While other children participated in sleep-overs, summer camps, and sports activities, Debbie’s childhood was spent at The House of Mah Jong, her family’s Chinese restaurant where she entered the workforce at the age of three, selling cigarettes. By six, her responsibilities expanded to inserting umbrellas into cherries and pineapple slices for an assortment of exotic drinks while sitting on a bar stool.As the family business grew in popularity and fame, she was thrust into the land of the South Seas where The House of Mah Jong evolved into a Polynesian nightclub; ubiquitous of dining experiences in the 1960’s and 1970’s. She became an exotic hula and sword dancer performing weekly at nights after a full day at middle school and then high school.

In their quest to assimilate in the United States, her parents abided by strong work ethics, fanatical hospitality, relationship-building, supporting organizations in the community, and always taking care of others. It was a family ethos that is known today as philanthropy.

It is no wonder that Debbie has since established a distinguished 30 year career as an arts activist, a non-profit consultant, and CEO  - leading some of the country’s most renowned cultural institutions and their programs - championing equity and inclusion. A business philosophy long modeled by her father, and long before the emergence of the DEI acronym.

Follow Debbie’s journey in this memoir. A colorful compilation of inspiring and unfathomable stories woven together by humor, pathos, confluences of fate, and the eternal guiding hands of her ancestors. With over 170 rare family photos that provide the reader with a visual history.