Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You E-Book

Candice Chung

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 309

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'If only my Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word love…' 'A wonderfully heart-warming memoir from the bottom of the stomach.' Xiaolu Guo 'A real and delightful surprise, full of smart thought and deft words – and also very funny.' Ella Risbridger 'Poetic, delicious and full of moments of grace and beauty.' Nikesh Shukla What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents? For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there's been one thing on her mind lately: 'If anything happens, I love you.' Simple. Reasonable. If only her estranged Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word 'love'. Still, she's determined to tackle what's left unsaid. To find a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to tell each other all along – not in Cantonese or English, but with food. As Candice dives into the rituals of family dining, and her parents offer to join her at restaurants she's due to review, she begins to unravel how a decade of silence and distance have shaped their relationship. Through shared meals and culinary adventures – from steaming hotpots to pasta at uncomfortably romantic trattorias – they begin to confront the unspoken. And to unpick what it means to show care when you come from a culture where saying 'I love you' isn't the norm. Set against the backdrop of a burgeoning new relationship, grasped-at date nights mid-pandemic and an uncertain future across seas, Candice reflects on migration, solitude and intimacy. How can we rebuild closeness when we've drifted apart? Can food fill the gaps where words fail? For anyone who has ever found their loved ones' emotional worlds unreachable, Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You is packed with heart, humour and those bright-hearted moments around a dinner table that bring us together. __ 'Tenderly shows how food steps up to provide the emotional support, comfort, and safety that humans need, when words cannot.' Hetty Lui McKinnon 'Will undo anyone whose love language is food.' Tara Wigley, co-author of Ottolenghi SIMPLE

Leseprobe

Praise for

Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You

‘Like a hilarious, heartfelt and incredibly perceptive conversation you have with a good friend over dinner—the kind you think of many years after the plates and bowls get cleared—Candice Chung’s memoir stayed with me like the warmest of memories.’

Lee Tran Lam, food writer and creator of the award-winning

Should You Really Eat That? podcast

‘Tender, elegant, and deeply moving. Chung’s poetic prose blazes on the pages. What an incredibly beautiful memoir.’

Jessie Tu, author of The Honeyeater

‘A touching, poignant love story about so many great loves in Candice Chung’s life—at times heartbreaking, complicated and bittersweet, but also, uplifting and full of tenderness. I loved her precise descriptions of food which were so vivid and flavoursome and yet never overwritten.’

Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love

‘A tender, wise and witty memoir of forging connections through food and love. Chung’s prose is as deliciously playful as her palate.’

Leah Hazard, author of Womb

‘This will undo anyone whose love language is food; anyone whose connection with others depends on it. As well as telling her own story—love, life, making a living—Candice Chung draws up the kitchen chair for so many writing greats: M.F.K. Fisher, Bee Wilson, Deborah Levy, Nora Ephron.’

Tara Wigley, co-author of Ottolenghi SIMPLE

‘A delicious and moving treatise about love and longing, and all the ways families express or hide these life-sustaining things. Candice Chung, who has also been a food critic, writes with a poet’s sensibility and a gourmand’s sense of lusciousness. Her sentences sing off the page. I am enthralled by this book.’

Alice Pung OAM, author of Unpolished Gem and One Hundred Days

‘A comforting hotpot of a book. Every page offers a new surprising morsel about connection and choice; always nourishing, always delightful, always tender.’

Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

‘A wonderfully heartwarming memoir from the bottom of the stomach. Candice Chung shows us how love and relationships can be influenced by food culture, and how our dinner tables have shaped the way we understand the world, as well as ourselves.’

Xiaolu Guo, author of Radical and A Lover’s Discourse

Candice Chung is a writer, editor and a former restaurant reviewer for The Sun-Herald. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Food, The Australian Gourmet Traveller, SBS Food, bestselling food author Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Peddler Journal and more. She is a founding member of Diversity in Food Media Australia, which supports and promotes underrepresented voices in food.

I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the Country on which much of this book is set, and I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. The Australia I have written about always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Sovereignty was never ceded.

For Mabel, Chi-Wah and Esther

Look for yourself, and ask not what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.

—Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Taking your hand, Elinka says, ‘But no land can be paradise if you can never leave it.’

—Edward Packard, Inside UFO 54-40: Choose Your Own Adventure No. 12

Contents

Prologue

I       Etiquette for the Solo Diner

II      Etiquette for Lovers

III     Etiquette at the Family Table

Epilogue

Works Referenced

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Now, tell me—

What can I get you?

And is everything OK?

I’ll be right there, yes.

Here—

let me take these things away.

At the restaurant, we hear all the things we want our lovers to say.

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 burg

er, 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 straightforward 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 something 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.

I

Etiquette for the Solo Diner

Dinner/Dates

In the three years when I was very single, most dates happened over drinks. Between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. was my favourite hour. It was a time of day for meeting strangers that had a business-casual charm, and was not so late that I would be distracted by pressing thoughts of dinner.

I’d just left the psychic reader—the dinner partner of my twenties and a slice of my thirties—and I wasn’t ready to rush into shared meals. We’d started eating together right away. Over food, I found out he drew, wrote, knew the Kabbalah; read Carlos Castaneda and novels that had hard-boiled characters with big hearts. He had a library card that he actually used, and never dog-eared anything. Unlike me, he had no impulse to leave even the smallest wrinkle on anything that moved him.

On one of our first dates, I ordered a seafood tower, something I had always dreamt of doing if I ever fell in love. I wanted to treat him to a dinner that matched the largeness of the feeling in my chest. Something that said, I like you so much that it feels French.

In reality, it was difficult to speak over a tower of dead fish. Our meal arrived on a double-decker platter: chilled prawns, fried squid, piles of wine-cooked mussels and a ramekin of the sweetchilli baby octopus that wreaked havoc in the mid-2000s. After that night, we hung out for thirteen more years. A huge dinner—even an ill-thought-out one—turned out to be the Thelma and Louise of first dates. The next time around, I reminded myself to slow down.

People say dating apps are full of weirdos. But I soon learn weirdness is the bread and butter of dating—the key is to remember nothing that bad has time to fully unfurl over a Sydney-sized wine.

‘What if you have nothing in common?’ my friend Michelle asks.

‘That’s what the bar is for.’

‘The alcohol?’

‘The other people!’ I remind her our own friendship was forged on shared interests that include commenting on strangers’ pant length and tote bags.

Besides having others to comment on, a bar is the perfect place to opt out of sitting across from someone else. Think of the most stressful encounters between two strangers. Chances are, they’re sitting face to face. Any single person can tell you police interrogations and job interviews would have a much better ambience if only people sat laterally—an instantly relaxing move, wine or no wine.

It was in this way that I found myself drinking next to new dates for a while. Once, I met a pizzeria manager who went through his staff roster with me. Another time, I learnt the ins and outs of how to run a frozen-meal factory over two negronis. There was the Spanish architect who told dad jokes, the software engineer who asked if it would be OK if another date joined us (‘No problem if not, you texted first!’ he added). There was the short-story writer who used to be in a band that played at sprawling summer festivals. For our date, he arrived on a motorbike, and spoke so quickly that it felt like he’d run a few red lights just to get me up to speed on all the new projects in his life.

‘Do you have siblings?’ he asked, after one beer and two Coca-Colas.

‘A sister.’

‘Do people mistake you for her?’

It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about. But that was the beauty of dating—you never knew what kind of trouble people imagined you might run into. The possibilities from a fresh pair of eyes were boundless.

I mulled over his question. ‘Actually, it happens on the phone sometimes. We’re kind of voice twins.’

He took a long sip of his Coke and windscreen-wiped the side of the glass with his fingers.

‘What about you?’ I asked.

‘Same, a sister.’

He said her name, which sounded familiar.

When he saw the faraway look on my face, he added, ‘She’s in a more popular band.’

It was true, too. I had her songs on my Spotify.

I met a boy in New York whose flat had caught fire twice. We went to a bar not far from his apartment, a happy stretch of town that overlooked a sprawling park and beautiful brownstones. I had never kissed anyone who’d survived two house fires.

Earlier, he had told me about his flatmate who’d set his own blanket on fire when he fell asleep with a lit cigarette. My date had been terrified when he broke into the room and saw his flatmate facedown, unmoving. ‘He was trying to sleep through the fire alarm,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’

I liked the way he told stories. How there was a relaxing quality to his voice that made bad things seem not-awful, or like they might still work out.

The next time, the flatmate burnt a shirt and some shoes on the balcony. No explanation. Just a home-style Burning Man.

‘Why didn’t you kick him out?’ I asked.

‘There were these girls who slept in his room sometimes, just squatting. I didn’t know where he would go. Where they would all go.’ Eventually, he stopped caring.

We watched people come and go, and drank more of the wine we couldn’t afford.

Once, his father had taken him and his brothers to a theme park in France. It was summer holidays; kids were everywhere. He stayed on a ride too long and lost sight of his dad. ‘I didn’t move for 20, maybe 30 minutes. Just waiting. Then I got bored and walked around, checked out the rest of the park and went back to the same ride.’

Eventually, a guard spotted him alone. By that time, he was crying. They drove around in a buggy, neither person speaking the other’s language, until they found his family.

‘The worst part was, no one even noticed I was missing. They were just happy doing what they were doing.’

I sat side by side with him for the longest, until all of the stories were done.

The first time Dad found himself shoulder to shoulder with strangers, he was at the cafeteria at the Bank of East Asia—on one of the top floors of its bone-white, Art Deco head office in Hong Kong. He was 21 and had just been hired for a role in the remittance department, where he would start at 9 a.m., finish at 6 p.m. and break for an hour of work-catered lunch.

Exactly what his small team did during those hours, he wasn’t sure. But come noon every day, he would take one of the two lifts in the building to the mess hall, find his assigned seat at a banquet table, and marvel at the enormity of the world he had just entered. All around him were bright-eyed folks young and old. The giant, round tables felt like slow-moving planets—hissing with life and smells and just-cooked food that someone had made for each of the 400 office inhabitants, just for showing up. It was what being at an Ivy League college must feel like, he thought. Chosen. And there he was—hungry for it all.

At the bank, he met Ah Yun. The two serious, neatly dressed co-workers would wander down to lunch together. Ah Yun was a slow eater and was usually ambivalent about the comfort-food lineup: ‘四餸一湯, 白飯任裝,’ he would say in a singsong way. Four mains, one soup and all the rice you can fit in your stomach. Unlike Dad, he would rarely eat more than a few mouthfuls of the steamed carp with ginger and shallot, or take his time with the best bits of a white-cooked chicken, or sigh with happiness when the kitchen brought out plates of pork patties freckled with salty mustard greens.

Instead, Ah Yun would coax his friend into abandoning the meal so they could take trips to the busy, expat-filled malls downtown.

‘Chi-Wah, come see this!’ he would say, pointing at the smartest-looking leather shoes as if they were spotting wildlife.

At some point, the conversation would stray from window shopping.

‘Have you met a girl yet?’ Ah Yun would ask, and Chi-Wah would always respond with a sturdy shake of the head. It wasn’t that he’d never thought about meeting someone. But with a full-time job and three evenings of night school, all he had time to plan were snack runs to the nearest bakery right before class started.

Still, Chi-Wah continued to say yes to hanging out with his shoe-watching buddy, and occasionally had dinner at Ah Yun’s house where he lived with his mum.

‘Have you met a girl yet?’ Ah Yun’s mum would ask, before plying her son’s skinny friend with all the food that might shift his luck.

It wasn’t long till Ah Yun himself met a girl and, not long after, broke the news that he was getting married.

It would be a heaving banquet. A three-hour, ten-course affair. At least a dozen guests from the office would be there. Chi-Wah showed up in his best work suit with a cash gift that was large enough for a pair of handsome English leather shoes.

At the gift desk was a girl, quietly flustered, working through an enormous list of names and marking off what each guest had brought, so the bride and groom would write the correct message on their thank-you notes. She wore a high-necked fuchsia dress—so long that it came all the way down to her ankles. Chi-Wah noticed the way she bunched up the hemline while she shifted around to greet someone here, or move a present there. Sure, she was comically beautiful. But he had also never seen anyone, outside of work or his night classes, so committed to a task.

He waited in line with the other guests and, when it was his turn, took a breath and introduced himself.

‘I am Chung Chi-Wah,’ he said.

The gift girl looked up, then combed through the list, searching for the smiley guest’s name.

When she didn’t say more, he said: ‘My name is Chung, as in the characters “gold” and “sturdy”; Chi, as in the character for “determination”; and Wah, as in “glory”—like glory of the nation.’

Surprised at the prompt, she looked up at the stranger once more. What she couldn’t have known—at least not until months later—was that Chi-Wah’s father was once an aspiring scholar. That he was a painter of sun-sluiced landscapes who made canvas after canvas of work that rested by the bunk beds of his children’s room. That even though he had given it all up to run a fruit market, his ambition for beauty lived on in his eldest son’s name. It just wasn’t the kind of beauty you would usually trouble a girl with the first time you met.

The gift girl found his name and marked it off with a small, inky tick.

‘There you are!’

That night, Chi-Wah was proud of the impression he’d made. He’d shown the first girl he liked the finest thing about himself. But for the rest of the three-hour, ten-course dinner, he ran through all of the things he could’ve asked her—like her own name, and the constellation of stories that must’ve made it—if only they weren’t sitting so far apart.

Ask Mabel about the night of her uncle Ah Yun’s wedding, and she will tell you it was a nerve-racking blur. The world is full of weirdos, she had thought. Weirdness is the bread and butter of weddings. Afterwards, to make matters worse, her parents kept getting phone calls from people who wanted to meet ‘the girl at the gift desk’.

‘What the hell do I do with these knuckleheads?’ her mum complained to Ah Yun, whom she held responsible for her seventeen-year-old daughter’s small village of new suitors.

‘Make a list,’ said Ah Yun.

‘To ban them?’

‘To see who asked about her first. Let the first person visit, then the second, and so on.’

At this part of the conversation, Mabel baulked. ‘I’m not a prize pig!’ The whole idea felt rude, if not altogether insulting. And anyway, no one from the night had made the slightest dent of an impression on her. To get rid of the trouble at hand, however, she would say yes to meeting one person. After that, she would focus on her dream of being a free-spirited nun like Maria from The Sound of Music—the all-singing, all-dancing woman in her favourite foreign film.

It was down to Ah Yun to sort out the dastardly list, Mabel’s mum said. And so it was that days later, when he got back to Mabel with a small piece of paper and a single name, she found herself reading three words that felt oddly familiar.

Chung Chi-Wah.

‘Look happy.’ That was the only piece of advice Chi-Wah’s mum had given him before his first job interview, and she repeated it now—right before he was due to meet Mabel and her family. It was thin, instruction-wise. But there was a kind of gravitas to the grain-sized wisdom, and he usually found himself paying attention when she spoke like this.

Outside, the streets were slick with buttery rain. He was used to getting up early, starting his commute when people still smelled of their morning shampoo in the MTR carriage. It was a Saturday, but he had woken up the same time as he did during the week. He followed the hour-long route he had looked up earlier and made his way to Sai Wan Ho, a neighbourhood that was quieter and smelled nicer than his own in wharf-side Kennedy Town.

He got there before Ah Yun, who came along to make introductions and, technically, to show that Chi-Wah was no weirdo. The two men nodded a quick hello downstairs before making their way up to the morning group date.

‘你好, 世伯, 伯母!’ Chi-Wah greeted Mabel’s folks, at a decibel that signalled either mild anxiety or deep confidence.

‘王小姐, 你好.’ Miss Wong, hello.

Chi-Wah handed over some fruit and a small tin of Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies, then found himself seated shoulder to shoulder with Mabel on an expensive, plastic-covered couch. How odd, he thought; now that she was so close, he found himself suddenly empty of questions. In the back country of his mind, he grasped for something—anything—and remembered to smile.

Between tea and cookies, it was Mabel who brought up the name of a Chinese literature teacher he recognised; Mabel who worked out that they had gone to the same high school—New Method College—and that she had graduated a few years after him.

At the end of the date, Chi-Wah shook everyone’s hands, apart from Mabel’s. And he left with his heart like a tight fist in his chest.

A week passed, then two. No word from anyone at the Wong household. Eventually, Chi-Wah asked Ah Yun to take him for a second visit, a request that was promptly laughed off: ‘You know where they live!’ When he telephoned one weekend out of the blue, Mabel was surprised and—just quietly—a little bit impressed that someone who had sat so modestly in her living room had this amount of cold-calling courage. Later, it was the same courage that earned Chi-Wah an invitation back to the Wongs’ to help celebrate the youngest sibling Anna’s birthday. A second date.

‘Give that young man a call,’ Mabel’s mother said. ‘Someone who smiles that much can’t be all bad.’

To hear Mum and Dad tell their story is to hear a grab bag of scenes that sometimes feels no different from the way they manage to pick up cut-price meat.

‘I knew the right time to strike,’ Dad would say.

‘Just happened,’ Mum might add, in summary.

Still, friends are always asking why they still hold hands in public. My sister and I have no interesting explanations to offer, save the fact that they have done this for nearly four decades—an amount of time that is both unfathomable and puts the fear of God into our largely single hearts.

‘They’re fine,’ one of us will tell our misty-eyed friends. ‘Poor circulation? Probably a reflex.’

For their 40th anniversary, Mum and Dad decide to book a cruise to see the gnarly bits of New Zealand. They’ve always played it safe, often spending their holidays in parts of the world they’ve already been to and loved. But this time, they want to dip their toes into something new. A twelve-day, all-inclusive trip to get a taste of the wild, pleasantly named places they have seen on Cantonese travel TV.

They ignore our jokes that cruise ships are floating, gastroprone casinos, and bring home pamphlets of the slow, sleepy route that will take them to the Bay of Plenty, near Whakaari—a fat, amphitheatre-shaped volcano whose belly glows yolk-bright and orange; past the teal waters of Dunedin; and among all the Fiordland penguins and bottlenose dolphins a person could handle in Dusky and Milford Sound.

There is also the dramatic name of the ship. Ovation of the Seas. It’s something they make a point to spell out—like the name of a famous cousin—in every update on our chat thread. My sister and I ready ourselves for photos of deckchairs and egregious buffet spreads, while we make our honest livings at our respective single-dwelling homes.

It’s the summer of bushfires and our city is burning. Around this time, I start chatting to someone who grew up near a Canadian forest. In his pictures, I look for evidence left by tall pines and the wide-open sky. Has the threat of bears or snow made him more nimble, less skittish than apartment-grown folks? In one photo, he is carrying a potted fiddle leaf fig in the crook of his arm—a large, slightly morose plant that he must’ve just adopted. He is smiling a big, new-parent smile at the person behind the camera who has caught the unlikely fig–human hug.

In another, he is surrounded by grey skies, somewhere ash-strewn, with a handkerchief wrapped around his nose. His eyes two happy lines. I mention this photo at Thursday drinks. My friends and I have started debating the merits of P2 masks in the time of bushfire. How do we stay normal and alive? His handkerchief is a dress code ahead of our time.

‘Is he clairvoyant?’ someone asks.

‘He studies volcanoes,’ I reply, not certain that this explains the plants or the forest or the very symmetrical features that make men and women beautiful in Japanese comic books.

‘A scientist?’

‘Geographer.’

They wait to hear more. But there is no more to tell. All I know is that he messages in full sentences, puts full stops at the end of his texts, and is reading the same book by a hopefully-one-day-popular writer that I am reading. We’ve agreed to meet the next Tuesday.

On the way home from drinks, I text the geographer about our mask talk.

‘Have you ever seen this film called I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone?’ he responds. ‘The second quarter takes place in the haze of Sumatran fires blowing over Malaysia. Two lovers try to unite on a shabby mattress wearing plastic ramen cup bowls fixed to their faces as dust masks.’

A pause. Then three grey dots.

‘In the end, you can’t get away from the smoke, or be actually intimate with another human. It’s a really depressing movie.’

I find the lovers’ faith in cup noodles uplifting and tell him so. In the end, we never know what will save us.

A few nights before we meet, he texts me a link. ‘Sunday reading?’

When I click on the story, it’s an essay called ‘“This Is Small Talk Purgatory”: What Tinder Taught Me About Love’.

‘There it is—my first pre-date assigned reading,’ I tell Michelle.

The whole time I am talking to the geographer, Mum and Dad keep sending dispatches from the ocean.

Hi girls, good morning. We’re very much enjoying the cruise. Especially the excellent food at different restaurants. We are eating lunch now.

Let me tell you something. There are a lot of strong men and women onboard. They eat and drink a lot. [Three cocktail emojis.] I just made an ice cream for your Mum.

Ovation of the Seas mascots: Panda mum Zen Ma, Panda baby Li Bao.

‘Is he still texting in full sentences??’ Michelle asks.

The Earth’s heart is restless. We confuse the bulk of what we don’t see with sturdiness and permanence. One Māori creation story says Whakaari rose from the belly of the world after the god Maui touched fire for the first time, and was so taken aback by the pain that he dove underwater to soothe himself. The spot where he shook off the fire became the site of Whakaari, later known by white settlers as White Island. The full te reo Māori name for the island is Te Puia o Whakaari, which means ‘The Dramatic Volcano’.

In a geological pressure cooker like Whakaari, when rising magma comes into contact with groundwater, liquid turns spell-like into steam, its volume ballooning until the pressure inside the volcano becomes so great that it explodes.

On the day this happens, a plume of ash nearly four kilometres high blasts into the atmosphere. Forty-seven day-trippers are stranded on the island, 38 from Ovation of the Seas. Nearly half perish.

‘What was the name of their cruise ship again?’ my sister asks.

It’s lunchtime on the day of their 40th anniversary. Instead of a volcano adventure, Mum and Dad decide to dock at the port of Tauranga, eating a completely unremarkable bento lunch, spending the afternoon in what seems like a completely unremarkable town. In the end, we never know what will save us.

The next night, when I meet the geographer for the first time and tell him what happened, he laughs. We are sitting side by side at a wide marble bar. I’ve scrapped the drinks rule in my head and said yes to dinner. What are the chances of any date going more pear-shaped than a news-making one?

‘How did your parents cope afterwards?’ he asks, his eyes still wide but his voice calm.

‘They went to dinner.’

‘And?’

‘They did the whole three-course thing. And—’

‘They mourned the dead?’ he asks.

‘In a way, yes.’ I tell him that instead of drinking in the deceased people’s honour, my parents paid their respects by ordering an extra side with their meal.

Then, in a safe space carved by woodfired bread and fried potatoes, he tells me stories about the letters he’s been writing to his faraway grandmother; how his father used to be a hot air balloon pilot and his mother worked at a women’s crisis centre. The way they’d met in high school when his father stood on someone’s rusty car hood, playing air guitar.

‘I’m leaving for a three-week trip to Indonesia in a fortnight,’ he says. ‘To Mount Merapi—it’s the most volatile of the country’s 120 active volcanoes, actually.’

It’s my turn to laugh.

‘Would you like to meet again in a few nights’ time?’ he asks.

Lorem Ipsum

Lately, instead of writing, I’ve been testing out the idea of food reviews as agony aunt columns.

Dear Reviewer,

What are the best places to eat with one hand, so I can actually hold my book?

When dating someone new, is it normal to want my bartender’s approval?

At 11am, 4pm, 2am—depression’s happy hours—what snacks would bring courage?

Over what food should you ask yourself if you’re ready for someone new?

I am having trouble starting a review. It is the last one I need to turn in for the year. On my laptop screen, I flit between my notes and pages of interview transcript, going back and forth between sentences I have highlighted in red (direct quotes) and blue (context)—the sum of which is already too long for a 600-word piece. I have a superstition that getting the beginning right will somehow make the rest of the story fall into place. This rarely works. But the idea that there is a right beginning—a line that opens up the possibility of everything—is so seductive that I drag my feet every time, as if all I have to do is stay calm and ‘not overthink it’. Like the most unbearable advice about dating.

Outside, the lunch crowd gathers at the alleyway cafe at the foot of my apartment building. It is the time of day when the chorus of coffee orders shifts into listless gossip. I contemplate abandoning my work for a slice of fig-and-walnut toast. I imagine my problems solving themselves when I bite into the dense bread loaded with perfectly lemoned avocado.

‘What’s the hook?’ my journalism teacher used to say. The hook, meaning the very thing that draws you in. It is a tough question to answer earnestly about fish and chips. But it’s not just the food. More and more I am troubled by the feeling that I am missing something. To write an honest story, author Deborah Levy says the writer needs to ask herself two questions: What does the main character want? And what’s stopping her from getting it?