Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is a memoir by food journalist Candice Chung, set mostly in Australia over two years (including during the COVID-19 pandemic) as she navigates a new relationship and reconnects with her parents. In the book, Chung observes how food brings people together, reveals inner worlds and sometimes keeps us apart.
Food as love language is a seminal trope in ‘diaspora writing’. This reviewer first saw the subject explored in a student zine – it was comforting to see some inkling of my life printed on a page in English for the first time. It was a sign that stories like mine were worth telling.
But in 2025, this trope needs to do more than comfort and to say something new about the diasporic experience. The memoir has a promising opening as the newly single Chung enlists her parents to join her in reviewing restaurants. They pantomime as ‘a normal family’, avoiding discussion of their 13-year estrangement. Why had Chung’s parents opposed her relationship? Why the breakup? These questions are left dangling while Chung takes us along on a series of dates, culminating in a ripening relationship with a new man.
The book promises to be ‘a memoir of saying the unsayable with food’. Chung indeed captures what it’s like to have words on the tip of your tongue, held back by a restraint that so often keeps the peace in migrant households, but leaves much unsaid. Like her parents, Chung still finds certain things unsayable. Instead, she uses food as metaphor, microcosm, substitute, solace. In the family home, Chung’s mother eats alone, without pleasure – ‘her desires fused with a full home’.
The desires that Chung chooses to focus on are the romantic kind. Much of the memoir concerns her relationship with her new lover. ‘Don’t show excessive awe when he offers to cook for you,’ Chung writes in a sappy list of commands, indulging herself in telling readers the faux-forbidden things she did in fact do. By comparison, her parents recede into the backdrop as the pandemic looms.
In the end, the memoir is less about Chung’s relationships with others than it is about her relationship with herself. She poses rhetorical questions and quotes other writers extensively (Bhanu Kapil: ‘Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?’), as though she lacks confidence in her own voice. Portions of text switch to second person, so reluctant the narrator seems to embody her desires. Restaurants are where Chung learns to express herself without doubt, as customer, reviewer, and in relation to others around the table.
There is a casual luxury to the way restaurants are set dressing for countless scenes. Chung asserts her independence by eating alone at an expensive New York brasserie. During the pandemic, she likens her own relationship to a restaurant, writing that she and her lover ‘keep showing up for shifts at each other’s kitchens’ – straight after an anecdote about the suffering of actual restaurants.
It would have been better to see more of the latter in a book about saying the unsayable. What of the flipside of comfort and a full stomach – rot and hunger? What of the cooks and produce sellers, so many of them migrants, at the back of house? But Chung is concerned with her own lack. ‘When I was nineteen, I worked as a waitress,’ Chung writes. ‘Everyone I knew was travelling for the summer.’
Read: Book review: I want everything, Dominic Amerena
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, composed in English by a writer fluent in many cuisines, was always going to be about a migrant experience. Food is a powerful way of expressing connection with culture, particularly for those of the diaspora who do not speak the language. And it is how many of us first experience other cultures, which is what makes this memoir appealing to a wide readership. Readers will do well to remember this is an Australian story more so than a Chinese one.
Just don’t expect a spicy hot malatang. This book is more a comfort soup.
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You: A memoir of saying the unsayable with food, Candice Chung
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781761067631
Format: Paperback
Pages: 366 pp
Release Date: 29 April 2025
RRP: $34.99
