I have felt the pull of this extravagant wanting elsewhere ... A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings.
At 35, after the end of a 13-year relationship, food journalist Candice Chung finds herself not only losing a life partner, but her most reliable plus-one for anonymous restaurant review assignments. When her retired Cantonese parents offer to eat with her, these outings turn into a backdrop against which they learn surprising things about each other-including how, for the past decade, they managed to silently drift apart.
This era of undercover eating brings into question Chung's idea of love, solitude and the darkly humorous theatrics of restaurant rituals. What do we secretly yearn for when we pay someone to cook for us? Do we actually have a different public and private 'eating self'? Can the dinner table help us reveal ourselves to each other in a way that words-even the most carefully crafted questions-can't?
When a geographer enters her life in the pandemic, Chung is visited by ghosts from her past. Can she stay true to her longing for intimacy as well as solitude? Or will the unspoken hurt from her family's history show up unbidden in her intimate life?
Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is a memoir about how our eating lives can bring us together, and -sometimes-keep us apart.
'Every word of Candice Chung's memoir is brave...This is an evocative, vulnerable and relatable collection of stories that tenderly shows how food steps up to provide the emotional support, comfort, and safety that humans need, when words cannot.' HETTY LUI MCKINNON
'A comforting hotpot of a book. Every page offers a new surprising morsel about connection and choice; always nourishing, always delightful, always tender.' BENJAMIN LAW
'Tender, elegant, and deeply moving. Chung's poetic prose blazes on the pages. What an incredibly beautiful memoir.' JESSIE TU
'Candice Chung, who has also been a food critic, writes with a poet's sensibility and a gourmand's sense of lusciousness. Her sentences sing off the page. I am enthralled by this book!' ALICE PUNG
'A world-spanning love story, a book of philosophy via the dinner table, a tender portrait of family trying to communicate: Candice Chung's gorgeous memoir is all of these things and more. A book I will be recommending to everyone.' REBECCA MAY JOHNSON, co-editor of Vittles and author of Small Fires
