Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You : Launching Candice Chung's memoir

For anyone who has ever found their loved ones’ emotional worlds unreachable, Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is a bittersweet memoir of love, heritage and the unspoken language of food - and we can't wait to host its Edinburgh launch.

Chung's memoir is packed with heart, humour and those bright- hearted moments around a dinner table that bring us together.

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?

Told in humorous autobiographical vignettes, Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You draws on the work of food-loving writers, artists and philosophers including Nora Ephron, MFK Fisher, Deborah Levy, Roland Barthes, Yiyun Li, Teju Cole and poet Bhanu Kapil.

For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there’s been one thing on her mind ‘If only my Cantonese parents weren’t so allergic to the word love…’What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents?

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.

CANDICE CHUNG is a Glasgow-based writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Food, The Australian Gourmet Traveller, Guardian, Gutter, and more. She is a founding member of Diversity in Food Media Australia, which supports and promotes underrepresented voices in food. Her story ‘Why Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You’, first published on The Sydney Morning Herald, generated more than 2 million page impressions.

Our host is the brilliant writer and editor Katie Goh, author of the forthcoming Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange.

Banner portrait by Wendy Huynh.