54. Take Away | Angela Hui
Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter
‘[Takeaway] points to something very universal: about food, about labour, about survival in a new place, about shame, and about the inheritance of generational trauma. It also happens to be exceptionally funny’
Jonathan Nunn, editor of Vittles
Friends,
I confess, I’ve never visited Mainland China and so I’ve never experienced the pleasure of eating true, authentic Chinese cuisine. The closest I’ve been is to Hong Kong but given the British occupation (156 years!) and given their propensity to change local cultures to fit their own, I’m sure that wasn’t authentic either.
I did however grow up in a country filled with immigrant families from all over the world and so my school years were filled with kids involved in their families businesses who had hardly any available time for after-school play. Greek and Portuguese kids whose parents had them hard at work after school in their family restaurants and Italian kids who spent weekends working in their parents delicatessens.
I’m finally getting to hear how it must have felt for them.
Angela writes humorously about her life growing up in a Chinese takeaway in rural Wales in the 1990s. The book is filled with wonderful stories of the tenderness of family dinners before service, her parents exhaustion and isolation as one of the very few Chinese families in the tiny Welsh village. She writes about the racism they experienced as a family and frequent vandalism of her parent’s shopfront.
‘Despite its ‘inauthenticity’, the Chinese takeaway has proved to be a huge success for over 50 years and has become and institution across the UK. These Chinese outposts settled in largely white communities, offering mildly exotic Chinese food to Brits who had never even heard of soy sauce and were more accustomed to eating beans on toast. Takeaways tended to avoid direct competition, so you’ll rarely see more than one Chinese takeaway in the same village; this is why the ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) community here in the UK feels so dispersed and isolated compared to big cities and communities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.’
This was a beautiful book to read.
‘Angela’s writing is so relatable. Chinese takeaway can’t taste the same again when you know how much love, sacrifice, and soul families have put into each dish. Finally takeaway food is represented wholeheartedly by someone who really gets it’
Elaine Chong, BBC Journalist
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This read looks incredibly interesting- thank you for putting it on my radar! Have you read ‘Crying in H Mart’? If not I think you’d enjoy it - covers a lot of similar themes to this book here!