CHINESE PARENTS DON'T SAY I LOVE YOU

For those who Cry (sic) In H Mart, savour Nigel's Toast and wander The Lonely City with Olivia Laing.

At 35, after the end of a 13-year relationship, food journalist Candice Chung finds herself not only losing a life partner, but her most reliable plus-one to restaurant reviews. When her retired Cantonese parents offer to eat with her, their anonymous food outings turn into a backdrop against which they learn surprising things about each other including how, for the past decade, they managed to silently drift apart. This era of undercover eating bring into question Chung's idea of love, solitude and the darkly humorous theatrics of restaurant rituals. What do we secretly yearn for when we pay someone to cook for us? Do we actually have a different public and private 'eating self'? Can the dinner table reveal ourselves to each other in a way that words even the most carefully crafted questions can't? When a geographer enters her life in the pandemic, Chung is visited by ghosts from her past. Can she stay true to her longing for intimacy as well as solitude? Or will the unspoken hurt from her family's history show up unbidden in her intimate life? Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is a memoir about saying the unsayable with food, and how our eating lives can bring us together and sometimes keep us apart. It's a testament of Candice falling in love and making space for a partner, and it's a tribute to her parents and the part they play in each other's lives through migration and assimilation, but it is also a story for anyone who has ever found their loved one's emotional worlds impenetrable, except for those fragile, bright-hearted moments around a shared meal. CANDICE CHUNG is a Glasgow-based freelance commissioning editor for SBS Voices and a founding member of Diversity in Food Media Australia, which supports and promotes underrepresented voices in food. She used to be a restaurant reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald and a contributor to New York Times Style Magazine Australia, Bloomberg, Good Food, SBS Food, Time Out, The Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Griffith Review and best-selling food author Hetty McKinnon's Peddler Journal.