Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, Candice Chung’s “memoir of saying the unsayable with food”, feels like a glimpse into her peri-pandemic journal. The title refers to the often-shared recognition by the children of immigrants, that expressions of love are indirect, and also filtered through food. Interestingly, Chung’s chosen work is as a food critic. As one relationship with a “psychic reader” has ended, she reflects on how love was shown and taught as she was growing up:
Around the same time Kurt Cobain died, my mother started freezing sandwiches. It wasn’t a reaction from grief, exactly. No one in our family had heard of Nirvana. We’d just moved from Hong Kong to Australia and, inspired by the school canteen’s frozen poppers, she thought it would be a good idea to give our packed lunch the same treatment, so the ham wouldn’t spoil under the harsh Australian sun… If there was one thing the Year of the Frozen Sandwiches taught me, it’s that sometimes things that look completely fine on the surface just aren’t what they seem.
Chung begins to include her parents in the dinners she arranges to review restaurants, and this gesture of outreach is a reciprocal, elliptical act of love. They can share opinions on food, but not their thoughts about each other. Interwoven with these reminiscences, and fragments of insights on her recent break-up, are linguistic insights into Cantonese.
In colloquial Cantonese, ‘to have enough ginger’ is to have courage. It is the kind of compliment you’d hear in a nineties gangster film. The last time I fell in love with someone they didn’t like, it took us thirteen years to get over it. On balance, I do not have enough ginger to tell my parents I am seeing someone new.
We never learn the names of her partners; the new one is only referenced as “the geographer”. She frequently references other writers’ observations, making the memoir feel more like a personal journal, inviting us to see her inspirations, dreamy musings. Her own thoughts can recede in comparison.
In a hot pot, sometimes it is hard to tell what’s ready and what’s not. Leave something too long and there is a risk it’ll shrivel and get tough. Too little time and you’ll feel the consequences of your impatience. It’s guesswork as much as experience. In Cantonese, the word cooked, or ripen—is also used to describe the closeness of a relationship. Close friends or family members will describe their bond this way, as in ‘we are very cooked.’ I like the idea of waiting for intimacy to ripen. Some things can’t be rushed. It is impossible to speed up a meal like hot pot. While my sister and the geographer talk, Dad fishes out some prawns. He peels one carefully, still piping hot, then another, and then deposits their soft bodies into Mum’s bowl. She nods thanks, hardly looking up. Soon, the prawn shells are piled up like small stones in a Zen garden… In those moments I have felt a rush of longing I can’t name. ‘An empty shell, like an empty nest, invites day-dreams of refuge,’ Gaston Bachelard writes. ‘No doubt we over-refine our daydreams when we follow such simple images as these.’
It seems almost inevitable that this bit of psychic distance handed down, also results in physical distance, just as when Chung’s own parents moved from Hong Kong to Australia. In addition to using food as a language–to indirectly share feelings, but also to express the proximity of a relationship—the heritage of the diaspora also includes peregrination, where the next generation tries to recreate the foods of solace they can taste in their memories. How food figures into Chung’s next memoir will be interesting to watch.
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