Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You: A Memoir of Saying the Unsayable with Food
By: Candice Chung
FT – THE BEST SUMMER BOOKS OF 2025
‘If only my Cantonese parents weren’t so allergic to the word love…’
‘A wonderfully heartwarming memoir with lots of foodie insights.’ Rachel Khoo
‘A real and delightful surprise – and also very funny.’ Ella Risbridger
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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’.
With a 13-year relationship coming to an end, Candice Chung finds herself losing not only her first love but also her most reliable restaurant review partner. And so when her parents offer to be her new plus-ones, she faces a dilemma: is it better to eat together in polite silence or to try to broach how, for the past decade, they’ve managed to drift so profoundly apart?
Through shared meals and culinary adventures, Candice and her parents begin to break their silence. Yet when a new relationship begins to bloom, it forces her to try to address what still remains 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.
Set against the backdrop of this 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.
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‘A world-spanning love story, a book of philosophy via the dinner table, a tender portrait of family trying to communicate: Candice Chung’s gorgeous memoir is all of these things and more.’ Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires
‘Tenderly shows how food steps up to provide the emotional support, comfort, and safety that humans need, when words cannot.’ Hetty Lui McKinnon
‘Will undo anyone whose love language is food.’ Tara Wigley, co-author of Ottolenghi SIMPLE
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‘Chung’s prose is as deliciously playful as her palate’
- Leah Hazard, author of Womb -
‘Chung’s poetic prose blazes on the pages’
- Jessie Tu, author of The Honeyeater -
‘A wonderfully heart warming memoir with lots of foodie insights.’
- Rachel Khoo -
‘A world-spanning love story, a book of philosophy via the dinner table, a tender portrait of family trying to communicate … a vital new literary voice’
- Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires -
‘Hilarious, heartfelt and incredibly perceptive … Candice Chung’s memoir stayed with me like the warmest of memories’
- Lee Tran Lam, Should You Really Eat That? podcast -
‘A touching, poignant love story … at times heartbreaking, complicated and bittersweet, but also, uplifting and full of tenderness’
- Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love -
‘A comforting hotpot of a book. Every page offers a new surprising morsel about connection and choice; always nourishing, always delightful, always tender’
- Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law -
‘A delicious and moving treatise about love and longing, and all the ways families express or hide these life-sustaining things’
- Alice Pung OAM, author of Unpolished Gem and One Hundred Days -
‘Shows us how love and releationships can be influenced by food culture, and how our dinner tables have shaped the way we understand the world, as well as ourselves.’
- Xiaolu Guo -
‘Beautifully written, lean and nourishing, Candice Chung’s Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You is an astute, moving and often amusing memoir that does a profoundly affecting dive into how rituals around family dining are used as a vehicle for expressing what we really want to say, and how we really feel’
- LoveReading -
‘A thoughtful and compelling pastiche of fragments, lists, and literary reflections, Chung’s memoir revolves around her personal history with food, family and culture, but also around writing: Deborah Levy, Nora Ephron, Helen Garner and Craig Claiborne are all name-checked, and their influence is felt throughout.’
- Steph Harmon, Guardian Australia