A memoir about saying the unsayable with food, and how our eating lives can bring us together, and sometimes — keep us apart.
‘Every word of Candice Chung’s memoir is brave. Even the title Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is a triumphant declaration that unshackles both the author and the reader from the cultural taboos that can leave one feeling unmoored. 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
‘A delicious and moving treatise about love and longing, and all the ways families express or hide these life-sustaining things. 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. Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You introduces readers to a vital new literary voice with beautiful and playful prose that is part Nora Ephron part Maggie Nelson—a book I will be recommending to everyone.’ – Rebecca May Johnson, co-editor of Vittles and author of Small Fires
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, when a 13-year relationship ends, food journalist Candice Chung finds herself losing not only her first love, but also her most reliable restaurant review partner. Then her retired Cantonese parents offer to be her new plus-ones, and she faces a dilemma: is it better to eat together in polite silence, or to try saying the unsayable—to broach how, for the past decade, they managed to drift so profoundly apart?
Soon, a geographer enters her life, and the course of their relationship forces Chung to address what’s still left unsaid. To do so, she must find a new vocabulary—a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to express all along. Not through words, but with food.
Categories: Biography/Autobiography/Memoirs/Social Science/ Food.
Reading Age: YA to Adult.
RRP: Paperback in 336 pages NZ$34.99.
Published in NZ by Allen & Unwin
