Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You: A Memoir of Saying the Unsayable with Food

At age thirty-five, her thirteen-year relationship ended and food journalist Candice Chung found herself without not only her first love, but her most reliable restaurant review partner. When her retired Cantonese parents offered to be her new plus-ones, she faced a dilemma: was it better to eat together in polite silence, or to try saying the unsayable--to broach how, for the past decade, they had 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 her parents. 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.