Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You: A memoir of saying the unsayable with food

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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.

'I absolutely loved this book about all forms of love, and books and food and distance and travel. It was a real and delightful surprise, full of smart thought and deft words - and also very funny.' Ella Risbridger, author of The Year of Miracles: Recipes About Love + Grief + Growing Things

'A touching, poignant love story about so many great loves in Candice Chung's life - at times heartbreaking, complicated and bittersweet, but also, uplifting and full of tenderness. I loved her precise descriptions of food which were so vivid and flavoursome and yet never overwritten.' Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love

'A wonderfully heart warming memoir from the bottom of the stomach. Candice Chung shows us how love and relationships can be influenced by food culture, and how our dinner tables have shaped the way we understand the world, as well as ourselves.' Xiaolu Guo, author of Radical and A Lover's Discourse

'Candice Chung's memoir is poetic, delicious and full of moments of grace and beauty.' Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby

'Like a hilarious, heartfelt and incredibly perceptive conversation you have with a good friend over dinner - the kind you think of many years after the plates and bowls get cleared - Candice Chung's memoir stayed with me like the warmest of memories.' Lee Tran Lam, food writer and creator of the award-winning Should You Really Eat That podcast

'This will undo anyone whose love language is food; anyone whose connection with others depends on it.' Tara Wigley, co-author of Ottolenghi SIMPLE

'A tender, wise and witty memoir of forging connections through food and love. Chung's prose is as deliciously playful as her palate.' Leah Hazard, author of Womb

Author Bio

Candice Chung is a writer, editor and a former restaurant reviewer for The Sun-Herald. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Food, The Australian Gourmet Traveller, SBS Food, Griffith Review and more. She is a founding member of Diversity in Food Media Australia, which supports and promotes underrepresented voices in food media.