5 Questions with Candice Chung


 

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 the food industry. Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is her first book.

 

No.1

You were previously a food journalist, and are a founding member of the group Diversity in Food Media Australia. How have these experiences shaped your writing of Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, your debut book?

Working as a food journalist has influenced the way I think about storytelling in a few important ways. The first is learning to be comfortable with the ‘I’. In restaurant reviews especially, you are writing for one of the only sections in a newspaper where you get to report from a first-person perspective. There is no neutral lens to hide behind. You have to both own your opinions and accept that you are a character in the story—even if your role is simply to lend your eyes and stomach to a scene.

As a reader, I love the intimacy of seeing the world through a subjective narrator’s eyes. As a writer, however, I can find it unnerving to ask for someone’s undivided attention in such an explicit way. Author Yiyun Li once wrote, ‘A word I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we.’

Reading that quote unlocked something in me. It showed that my own discomfort with the ‘I’ might have a cultural, linguistic beginning. In a way, food reviews became a testing ground for me to find a first-person voice that felt both true and comfortable enough. It was a place to practise etching out people, places and sensorial details through my eyes, without succumbing to the fear that I was being too navel-gazing. All that was very helpful in memoir-writing. In Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You, the review outings also became anchor points for the narrative with my parents—so food journalism ended up having both a stylistic and a structural impact on my writing.

As for being part of Diversity in Food Media Australia, which is led by the inimitable Lee Tran Lam, it was a real-life expression of some of the frustrations we all felt as food writers: the precarity of the work, the difficulty of starting out as journalists or artists of colour, the issue of which restaurant’s story gets told in the mainstream media. It is very much against this wider backdrop that my memoir is set.

In the opening chapter, I made the conscious decision to begin a review scene without much of a foreground. The idea being, what if we lived in a world where a non-white person working as a food reviewer can be a given? What if we operated from the point of view that the narrator is qualified for the job, and needs no further explanation? That was the gaze I wanted to encourage in the reader.

No.2

In 2014, you wrote a short op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald with a similar title, ‘Why Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You’. How do you feel about that piece now, especially juxtaposed against the book a decade later?

When the op-ed came out in 2014, my editor and I were both completely surprised by the way it took off. The hook of that story came from a news report about a viral video, where a group of Chinese university students were asked to say ‘I love you’ to their parents for the first time and describe their parents’ reaction.

The amazing thing was that most of the parents involved weren’t moved or embarrassed but simply confused. In the sense of, ‘Why on earth are you saying these words to me?’ At the time I found that ‘crossed wires’ feeling to be so funny. And what felt funnier still was that I could see my own parents reacting in exactly the same way. My piece was about how my family would use food as a coded way to express any kind of affection or care, and avoid having to say sappy things at all cost.

When I wrote that op-ed, I tried very briefly to unpack why that is. How it has something to do with Chinese culture being a high-context culture (meaning a lot of emotions are implied and embedded in gestures, rather than spoken). Looking back, the biggest difference I feel is that the whole ‘I love you’ experiment (and my subsequent attempt to explain it) seem to come from a perspective that saying ‘I love you’ is the gold standard. And how odd that these parents didn’t conform with the (largely western) convention.

These days I can see that one thing wasn’t more ‘normal’ than the other. It’s the reason there is no ‘why’ in the title of my book. Even though it’s a one-word adjustment, it took years for me to see my own bias.

No.3 

The title is noteworthy, a statement that demands a response. I can’t help but ask: how have your own parents responded to it?

It’s a good question! I often get asked the same thing by readers at live events, and usually with a hint of worry in their eyes. Lucky for me, my parents have been very gracious. They seem to instinctively understand the spirit of what I was trying to say and never saw the title as a personal grievance or complaint.

The title, as you point out, is something of a provocation. One of the central contemplations of my book is the tension between gestures and words. How neither is perfect on their own when it comes to trying to get close to someone. I wanted to show that even a simple statement like ‘Chinese parents don’t say I love you’ can have a Rorschach test-like effect. The way it can bring up different emotions depending on the dynamic in the reader’s own family of origin. On a narrative level, it is also the ‘ghost’ that the narrator (i.e. book-me) must confront and overcome in order to understand that she has always been loved.

No.4

Relatedly, we now can see how much ‘food as love language’ stories have become a trope within diaspora writing. How did you navigate and/or resist that during the writing of Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You?

For something to become a trope, I feel like there’s often a seed that is real and true and integral at the heart of it all. The reason an image feels lazy or lacks vitality is that somewhere along the line it has lost specificity. And we end up leaning on it as an emotional ‘shortcut’. It’s that bland feeling we get when someone humours us with a safe opinion, and it makes us want to shake them and say, ‘Wait, but what do you actually think?!’

To me, what’s fascinating is the emotional register we’ve chosen to ‘peg’ food in. We mostly speak of it as a ‘love language’, when in fact food is just as often a placeholder for other, more complicated feelings: worries, frustrations, anger, awkwardness, loneliness, fear.

This means that as much as our eating lives can bring us together, it can also keep people at arm’s length if we keep choosing to ignore those feelings. In Chinese Parents, I tried to use different aspects of the eating experience to reflect the way we handle emotions in our family or in a romantic relationship. For instance, how we can never know the true cost of a hug or a shared memory the way you can just read the price of anything you want on a restaurant menu; or how a buffet is a real-life scenario of having to make tough choices between our various desires and longings.

No.5

What did you learn about yourself while writing Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You?

This is a big question. One of the things I experienced is how strong the pull of imposter syndrome can be. Even if I had spent much of my career working with words, even if it was a story about my own life, my own family, there were times when I didn’t feel qualified to tell it.

Writing a book comes with many dark nights of the soul. I learnt that I had to give myself permission to try and fail and keep trying before finding a way to capture a specific feeling on a page. It means having faith in myself on days when the word count calls for the opposite. And it means digging deep to summon the self-compassion—courage—to take risks. Towards the end of drafting, I had a note to myself that I looked at almost every day: Write like a daredevil. It’s earnest and slightly manic—but in the end, it was the only way to do it.

 

Find Out More

@candice_chung

 

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.

Get it from Allen & Unwin here.


Cher Tan