A review by vickywong710
Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter by Angela Hui

emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

3.75


I really wanted to give this book a full five stars, and I wanted to really love this book, but for me the book was just ok in parts. That said, it really picks up at the end. Probably more of a 3.5/3.75 out out of five stars.

As a child of Chinese takeaway owners, there were moments in this memoir that mirrored a lot of my own personal experiences of working in the family takeaway and there were a few moments that were quite close to the bone.

I liked the recipes and am eager to try those out. I also really appreciated the section at the end where she acknowledges that her memoir is only one such experience of what it is to be British-Asian, and no one person can fully represent or encapsulate the experiences of a very diverse diaspora.

I was also a 90s kid so a lot of the 90s/early-200s specific references like the Kookai bags and Myspace friends configurations were a nice throwback to have and gives you that sense of time and place.

It does have a tendency to lean too much into cliche, but I was willing to let that slide because it is a memoir written with a lot of sincerity.

The biggest and probably only letdown was some of the writing, and I will admit a lot of this could possibly just be a me problem.

I used to do food reviews in a previous job as a reporter in Hong Kong; part of that job involved getting a lot of F&B press releases, and there moments in the writing where it felt like reading an F&B press release description of food. I am the first to admit I was also not great at writing food reviews so wouldn’t have done any better, but food writing is very tricky and there’s only so many times you can use the word “umami” to describe a dish even if it’s used sincerely.

I think a huge part of why sometimes the food descriptions didn’t work for me is because I had recently finished Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet, which is just a mesmerising book about the history of Chinese food with beautiful descriptions of specific dishes.

Although the slightly more casual almost conversational writing style worked in parts of this book, there were some moments where that style just doesn’t work as well. There were moments that did at time feel repetitive, even some of the food descriptions get a bit repetitive.

I think the editing on this book could have been a bit tighter, you occasionally get clumsily-worded sentences like “Free of speech and living standards have been drastically deteriorating over the past decade, but Hong Kong remains one of the most densely populated cities in the world with 7.4 million people…” which makes sense but feel like it could have been rewritten a bit better.

Overall, enjoyed the book enough, I think it’s an important book to have in terms of broadening the number of books about the British-Asian experience, and hope there are more after this.
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