China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Author lifts lid on behind the counter culture
Considering how the British take great pride in what they came up with and subsequently gifted to the world — soccer, the steam engine and television, to name but three — when it comes to food, they seem happy to put their feet up and let others do the work.
Fish and chips has its origins among Portuguese Jews in the 16th century. Britain’s complicated relationship with India has resulted in curry becoming a national dietary staple, and another culinary outsider that has been embraced with open arms is the Chinese takeaway.
Angela Hui grew up in her parents’ takeaway the Lucky Star, in rural Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, and has written about her love of the culture and the food in Takeaway: Stories from a childhood behind the counter.
“When my parents sold the place in 2018, I realized how much of my life was wrapped up in the place,” she tells China Daily. “When they opened it, it was a survival technique — they came from poverty, they had no education and faced a language barrier, so they put everything they could into working hard to give their children the best that they could.
“It was an incredibly hard job, but still they found the time to do things for us, so as well as being about the shop, the book is about the immigrant experience, and the world of hospitality in general, as well as the customers we served. We had regulars who’d come all the time, we never knew their names, but we knew their orders.”
Although she admits her main motivation for writing the book was to remind her family of their small outpost of the East in the West, Hui says she is delighted by how universal it has turned out to be.
“The other day, I had an email from a 92-year-old Irishman who grew up in the family pub but said he could relate to so much of what I talked about, and I’ve had Jewish fish and chip shop owners saying the same thing, too.”
Food is inescapable in the book, not least because chapters are separated by Lucky Star recipes, and a childhood steeped in the colors, smells, tastes and noises of food preparation has left Hui with a vivid vocabulary when it comes to evoking its spirit.
“It was only as I wrote that I realized how many more adjectives there are in Chinese to describe food in such a sensory way than there are in English,” she says.
“Food is a very Chinese way of showing love — my parents were never really the types to go in for Western displays of emotion, but sitting down for a family meal before we opened the shop for service really mattered, and my mother would always put other people’s food needs ahead of her own.”
This particularly resonates when looking back at her rebellious teenage years.
“I was a typical lost teenage girl, desperately wanting to fit in but knowing that I was different, so often I would want a pizza or a burger rather than what my parents were offering. I rejected their food as a way of rejecting my identity, which must have been so hurtful.”
Many takeaway premises were previously fish and chip shops, which explains the continued presence of chips on many menus, as part of a cultural mash-up that might baffle Chinese food purists, but has earned it enduring love among the British.
But despite the continued appetite for the food, many second- or third-generation families do not have the same hunger to serve it as the original business founders, so the number of takeaway outlets is falling.
“Takeaway food was the food of survival, shaped by the ingredients that were available, and that’s what makes it so lovely,” she says. “It’s a unique variation on what people would regard as proper Chinese food.
“When my parents opened up, there was less choice but now at the tap of an app, you can have anything you want brought to your door, there’s a lot more competition.
“But there’s a lot of nostalgia — people love their takeaways, and the shops have incredibly loyal customers. Numbers might be falling, but I don’t think the takeaway will go away.”