Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Memoirs

CHINESE PARENTS DON'T SAY I LOVE YOU

Candice Chung

A Memoir of Saying the Unsayable with Food

For readers of CRYING IN H MART by Michelle Zauner, BUTTER by Asako Yuzuki and I WANT TO DIE BUT I WANT TO EAT TTEOKBOKKI by Baek Sehee.

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.

Available products
Book Published 2025-05-01 by Allen & Unwin

Comments

A comforting hotpot of a book. Every page offers a new surprising morsel about connection and choice; always nourishing, always delightful, always tender.

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.

This will undo anyone whose love language is food; anyone whose connection with others depends on it.

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.

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.

Candice Chung's memoir is poetic, delicious and full of moments of grace and beauty.

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.

UK rights went to Elliott & Thompson

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

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.

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!

Tender, elegant, and deeply moving. Chung's poetic prose blazes on the pages. What an incredibly beautiful memoir.