While other children enjoyed sleep-overs, summer camps, and sports activities growing up, Debbie Chinn’s childhood in Syosset, New York, was spent at The House of Mah Jong, her family’s Chinese restaurant. She entered the workforce at the age of three, selling cigarettes, and by six, was promoted 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 as the restaurant evolved into a Polynesian nightclub with floor shows, an ubiquitous dining experience in the 1960’s and 70’s. Chinn became an exotic hula and sword dancer performing weekly at nights after a full day at middle school and then high school.
All of this and much more is brought to vivid life in Chinn’s new book – Dancing in Their Light: A Daughter’s Unfinished Memoir (available everywhere books are sold) – which traces the author’s lineage back 13 generations and features more than 170 rare family photos. It includes the fascinating story of Chinn’s great-grandmother (born c.1850) who, as a young child, was discovered in a church lying next to her deceased mother. They were fleeing the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) in Peking, China, making their way to Shanghai. The first of many twists of family fate arose when a Southern Baptist missionary rescued and adopted her, and named her Mary Hartwell.
The book also sheds light on how Chinn found her calling and – after moving to the San Francisco / Bay Area – has built 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 and championing equity and inclusion. A business philosophy long modeled by her father – long before the emergence of the DEI acronym.
“In their quest to assimilate in the United States,” says Chinn, “my parents stressed a strong work ethic, 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.”
Adding to her long list of accomplishments in the arts and cultural world, on August 25, Chinn was named executive director of TheaterWorks Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California. Over the past 25 years, she has held a series of C-suite positions as executive director of Opera Parallèle at the Carmel Bach Festival, and as managing director of California Shakespeare Theater, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey and, most recently, of Anna Deavere Smith Projects.
She also has served on the boards of the San Francisco Community Music Center, Playwrights Foundation, the Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco, and more recently as Board President of Theater Bay Area.
For more information about Debbie Chinn, Dancing in Their Light and her non-profit leadership work, visit her website.
