Candice Chung

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: she has never told them, '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 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, 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.

A Memoir of Saying the Unsayable with Food

Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You

Cassandra Tang

A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings. 

If there was one thing the Year of the Frozen Sandwiches taught me, it’s that sometimes things that look completely fine on the surface just aren’t what they seem. 

In France, they turn their tables outward, facing the pavement. People read you, you read them - a tacit agreement to be observed. The pleasure of moving privately between worlds. 

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