Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You Extract

Read an extract from Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You by Candice Chung.

Gadigal Land, Sydney, December 2019

I meet my parents at a fish shop in an inner-city mall. By the time I get there, they are waiting in their windbreakers and matching hiking shoes.

I greet their outdoor energy with a wave hello.

‘This mall has good parking,’ Dad says.

Since my parents retired three years ago, they have been wearing hiking shoes everywhere. Because Dad also keeps a pen in his shirt pocket and likes to bring a backpack, this gives him a ‘ready for anything’ look that I both enjoy and find disorienting.

It was around the time of my parents’ style evolution that I started asking them along to restaurant reviews. Before writing for the paper, I assumed food writers simply showed up to new restaurants with witty, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants types. But those types have inconveniently full lives. To meet deadlines, you need a different kind of dining companion: someone who will eat with you at short notice; someone willing to get on the train for an hour for an ‘urgent’ Somali lunch; someone close enough to let you order everything and pick food off their plates, and who doesn’t mind if you point a camera in their direction, causing them to smile, before you say, ‘Wait, your head is blocking the light to the risotto. Would you mind—’

That person used to be my partner. He was a psychic reader when we met. For $45, he’d given me a half-hour tarot reading and studied the spidery lines of my palms. ‘You are slightly allergic to nightshades,’ he’d said, as if I hadn’t gone in to ask about love.

That day, the cards on the faded oak table said nothing about a relationship starting, how we were weeks away from falling into each other’s lives. There was no sign yet of my parents’ shock. Or the decade-long rupture. Or how, thirteen years later, things would end on a wet summer’s day without warning—just like the way we started. If he saw those things, he chose to keep quiet. Now I wonder if there’s only so much you can bear to say.

That summer of the first reviews with my parents, I’d turned 35. It was the year I left the psychic reader, quit my full-time job in a newsroom to become a freelancer and—for six months— quietly moved back into my suburban childhood home.

The fish shop is famous for its $40 scampi burgers. While lining up, I try to picture the kind of life that goes with a burger like this. Mum and Dad love burgers. They’re just against anything bread-related that costs more than a small Filet-O-Fish meal. To get around this, they begin to treat our review outings as work. For this work, they prepare their bodies in adventure gear and channel an aura that feels half start-up CEO and half backpacker-ish. Occasionally, I role-play my own characters with them.

‘One scampi burger, please.’ I try ordering the extravagant lunch without doubt, like a rich person. ‘Also, a large fries, half a dozen oysters and a fisherman’s basket.’

Dad finds us a small round table next to the condiment station. I notice the fish shop is attached to a deli, which is attached to a butcher. On that side, it sells game birds, ambitious sausages and aged meat on a temperature-controlled, backlit shelf. It reminds me of a rapper’s expensive shoe collection.

I make a note on my phone and mention this unusual fit-out to my parents.

‘It’s just like Kam Kee,’ Dad says, unimpressed, referring to the Chinese grocery store in their neighbourhood, which also sells fish, bold cuts of meat and excellent Cantonese barbecue.

‘You know they also sell fish and chips?’ he adds.

To him, what’s more noteworthy is the condiment selection right next to our table. He nods at the abundance of miscellaneous sauces, salt and pepper packets, spare cutlery and serviettes to which we now have front-row access, thanks to the spot he chose.

‘Look—ketchup, tabasco, chicken salt, anything we need!’

There is a glint in his eye that suggests this is a spot that anyone would be lucky to grow old in, among the refrigerated creatures of the land and sea. I don’t say anything about the insoluble problems that cannot be corrected by condiments. I turn to Mum, who is smiling, though her spirit seems to be taking a cigarette break.

When the buzzer sounds, I pick up our lunch and we share it picnic style, our feet dangling from tall stools. The $40 burger is fat with scampi. I cut it into three equal portions and distribute our fortune. The scampi flesh is buttery and sweet.

‘唔錯,’ says Dad. Not bad. I note this on my phone. For him, something that’s not even a little bit bad is extraordinary. And because he is smiling, I think he means it.

Mum pokes at the side salad, then starts on the fried fish, which makes a pleasant crackle when the batter breaks. She dips a fillet in tartare sauce and eats it with a bit of burger bun. I realise she is making her own Filet-O-Fish.

‘How are you?’ she asks, without looking up.

I am stumped by the simple question. The way she asks it in English—her secret weapon for tricky subjects: body parts, feelings, apologies.

Usually, I have the perfect answer. Something straight- forward that doesn’t raise further interest or alarm. The key is in the punctuation: a light inflection to signal an enthusiasm for living (Good!), then a calm, full-stop finish (Thanks.). The tonal parabola. Then I count ‘one elephant’ and change the subject. But lately, something has stopped working.

The week before the fish shop outing, I went to the GP to ask for sleep medication, which he refused. In the middle of our conversation, he asked how I was doing. I was thrown by the question. My parabola was off.

‘How long have you been having trouble sleeping?’

‘A week—maybe six?’

He handed me a multiple-choice test to answer. It is some- thing called the DASS-21. At question 20, I paused.

Over the past week, I felt scared without any good reason.

Never. Sometimes. Often. Almost always.

Afterwards, he told me I had scored a distinction-equivalent in the areas of depression, anxiety and stress.

‘Do you have thoughts of harming yourself?’

‘No,’ I answered quickly. It was no time for elephants. But he searched my face for several counts of invisible mammals of his own.

‘I can get you on a mental health care plan,’ he said.

‘Meaning—’

‘Ten sessions of government-sponsored therapy.’

‘Like, a depression discount?’

He did not laugh.

‘You can consider medication,’ he said. ‘Severe depression should be treated seriously. But why don’t you start with these sessions first?’

At the fish shop, Mum looks up from her Filet-O-Fish. She does not let the question slide. It strikes me that there was a time when my parents and I would’ve done anything to avoid asking how each other was doing. It feels like something in the belly of the Earth must’ve shifted.

I consider saying something about the doctor, the sleep, the distinction.

‘My GP gave me a discount this week.’

She looks up, searching for something on my face.

‘Our GP is free,’ Dad says.

When I don’t say more, she gives me the last few chips from her plate. They are the crispy ones that I like.

Maybe nothing has really changed between us—maybe it’s just the lack of sleep talking. On these restaurant outings, the three of us make a perfect team. No one ever suspects we are working undercover, or raises an eyebrow when they walk past our table. No one ever asks—not even once—why we stopped setting foot in each other’s kitchens for thirteen years.

At the restaurant, we are a normal family.

An extract from Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You by Candice Chung

Available 29 April wherever books are sold.