Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You

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, 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 for anonymous restaurant review assignments. When her retired Cantonese parents offer to eat with her, these 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 brings 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 help us 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 how our eating lives can bring us together, and—sometimes—keep us apart.