Takeaway: Stories from a childhood behind the counter

Angela Hui

Trapeze (July 2022)

Review by Lara Jay Hequet

‘Food is always more than the sum of its ingredients’, writes Angela Hui close to the start of her memoir, Takeaway, an account of life behind the counter of one of the many immigrant-run takeaways that have become a staple of British culture. 

Hui recalls how her immigrant Chinese parents, who opened up a takeaway aptly named ‘Lucky Star’, dreamt that ‘British streets were paved with gold’. They believed naively that relocating to rural Wales would lead to a better life for them, Angela and her two older brothers. 

The book illuminates encounters from a child’s perspective; it’s a tumultuous coming-of-age story with Angela increasingly aware of her outsider status even though she was born in Wales. Over decades, she eventually acquires a wider perspective of underlying cultural differences. As a member of a migrant family, she experiences racism which partly informs her identity in a world of multiple cultures. 

She comes to believe that food has transcendental power: to take us to countries without physically going there, to speak in a language where words are not required, to evoke emotions one might never have known existed.  

‘In Chinese culture, we don’t greet each other by saying “hello”,’ writes Hui. ‘We ask, “Sin jor fan mei ah?”, namely “Have you eaten yet?”’ It’s one of the most important phrases in Chinese. ‘Eating well and eating properly are two very important things in Chinese cuture,’ she writes. As a child, however, she could not understand why her parents continued to practice – and immerse their children in – the rich traditional culture which alienated them from their neighbours in rural Wales. 

Takeaway shines a light on life in and around the business of food. ‘If the kitchen is the heart of the home, then the counter was my portal to another dimension – it was the gateway to work life and home life.’ The memoir provides a deep look into how a kitchen and a home intertwine, providing lessons for life one could never value until one finally gets freedom from it. As a child, Hui felt ‘trapped and obligated to be at the takeaway’. She recalls: ‘I would see the two of them on their feet all day and night, working their socks off in order to put food on our table and keep the roof over our heads.’

Takeaway is very much an intergenerational tale: ‘My parents risked everything to migrate to a Western country to create a better life and now it’s our turn to tell the story of our immigrant parents, to embrace our culture and to speak up in order to fight racism.’ Hui accomplishes this while including her favourite recipes, cooked only for the family and not available on the takeaway menu.

Fundamentally, Takeaway is an important read for all of us who have grown up in multiple cultures, wrestling with identities that are shaped both by our parents’ culture and our own experiences.