Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You

A Memoir of Saying the Unsayable with Food

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Pub Date Apr 24 2025 | Archive Date Not set

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Description

‘If only my Cantonese parents weren’t so allergic to the word love…’

‘A wonderfully heart-warming memoir from the bottom of the stomach.’ Xiaolu Guo

‘A real and delightful surprise, full of smart thought and deft words – and also very funny.’ Ella Risbridger

'Poetic, delicious and full of moments of grace and beauty.’ Nikesh Shukla

What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents? For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there’s been one thing on her mind lately: ‘If anything happens, I love you.’ Simple. Reasonable. If only her estranged Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word ‘love’.

Still, she’s determined to tackle what's left unsaid. To find a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to tell each other all along – not in Cantonese or English, but with food.

As Candice dives into the rituals of family dining, and her parents offer to join her at restaurants she’s due to review, she begins to unravel how a decade of silence and distance have shaped their relationship. Through shared meals and culinary adventures – from steaming hotpots to pasta at uncomfortably romantic trattorias – they begin to confront the unspoken. And to unpick what it means to show care when you come from a culture where saying ‘I love you’ isn't the norm.

Set against the backdrop of a burgeoning new relationship, grasped-at date nights mid-pandemic and an uncertain future across seas, Candice reflects on migration, solitude and intimacy.

How can we rebuild closeness when we’ve drifted apart?

Can food fill the gaps where words fail?

For anyone who has ever found their loved ones’ emotional worlds unreachable, Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is packed with heart, humour and those bright-hearted moments around a dinner table that bring us together.

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‘Tenderly shows how food steps up to provide the emotional support, comfort, and safety that humans need, when words cannot.’ Hetty Lui McKinnon

‘Will undo anyone whose love language is food.’ Tara Wigley, co-author of Ottolenghi SIMPLE

‘If only my Cantonese parents weren’t so allergic to the word love…’

‘A wonderfully heart-warming memoir from the bottom of the stomach.’ Xiaolu Guo

‘A real and delightful surprise, full of smart...


Advance Praise

‘Chung's prose is as deliciously playful as her palate' Leah Hazard, author of Womb

‘Chung’s poetic prose blazes on the pages’ Jessie Tu, author of The Honeyeater

‘A wonderfully heart warming memoir with lots of foodie insights.’ Rachel Khoo

‘A world-spanning love story, a book of philosophy via the dinner table, a tender portrait of family trying to communicate ... a vital new literary voice’ Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires

‘Hilarious, heartfelt and incredibly perceptive ... Candice Chung’s memoir stayed with me like the warmest of memories’ Lee Tran Lam, Should You Really Eat That? podcast

‘A touching, poignant love story ... at times heartbreaking, complicated and bittersweet, but also, uplifting and full of tenderness’ Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love

‘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, author of The Family Law

‘A delicious and moving treatise about love and longing, and all the ways families express or hide these life-sustaining things’ Alice Pung OAM, author of Unpolished Gem and One Hundred Days

‘Chung's prose is as deliciously playful as her palate' Leah Hazard, author of Womb

‘Chung’s poetic prose blazes on the pages’ Jessie Tu, author of The Honeyeater

‘A wonderfully heart warming...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781783968855
PRICE £16.99 (GBP)
PAGES 256

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