Growing Up Chinese

Reflections

There are the obvious humiliations, of course. The lunchbox shame. The slow death of opening whatever your parents had packed for you — something fragrant, half-alive, garlicky, dried-fishy, braised whatever — in a classroom full of kids eating sterile ham and cheese sandwiches on bread as white as their skin, tucked away in zip-lock bags, so inoffensive. I remember envying those lunches, convincing myself they held some bland promise of fitting in. How foolish I was. Then came the pinched noses, the muffled “eww”s, and the early lesson that whatever you were, it was somehow too much. Too smelly. Too foreign.

But age (and, by age, I mean the weathered old age of 23) has a way of sanding down embarrassment and replacing it with something more useful. Gratitude, maybe? Perspective. A grudging awe. Because growing up Chinese, for all its contradictions, absurdities, and unspoken rules, comes with its own quiet mysticism. A logic that doesn’t always explain itself. A language of love and guilt and food and superstition that may not ever make sense, but one I have come to appreciate more and more.

Or maybe I am just a nostalgia merchant.

I suspect a lot of my fellow Chinese comrades, or comrades of the diaspora, raised somewhere between duty and distance, will recognise the terrain. And, for everyone else, this is a little window into the machinery.

In Chinese families, “I love you” is not something you hear tossed around lightly. Neither is “I forgive you.” These do not roll easily off the tongue.

You’ve just been yelled at. Bad grades, bad attitude, existing incorrectly, who knows. You’re hunched over a desk, maybe crying over a maths problem, or an English comprehension exercise that has somehow become a referendum on your worth as a human being. Then your mother comes in. She says nothing. She places a bowl of freshly cut fruit beside you. Apple or orange slices, a mixture of freshly washed berries, mango carefully peeled. And walks out.

That’s it.

Is it healthy? Who knows. But that is the “I still love you, idiot.” No speech. No hug. Just fruit. An act so understated it’s almost brutal in its precision. You either understand it, or you don’t.

Then there’s the great and maddening Chinese concept of yeet hay. Roughly translated as “heaty,” which explains almost nothing. It’s not quite an illness. Not exactly indigestion. It’s a state of being. A cosmic imbalance.

Eat a reckless amount of guilty, greasy nonsense, and soon enough you’re not just full, you’re internally compromised. Pimples coming in. Mouth dry. Stomach off. A kind of inflamed misery simmering beneath the skin. You are, in the diagnosis of every Chinese mother and auntie within a five-mile radius, “too hot inside.”

But there is always a cure. Barley water. Herbal tea. Some bitter, brown, liquid you resist until you drink it and realise they were annoyingly right. Again.

This is the thing about Chinese culture. It feels like a long-running negotiation between practical wisdom, ancient cosmology, family obligation, and low-level emotional blackmail. And nowhere is that more obvious than in how we eat.

The Confucian idea of filial piety isn’t some abstract philosophical concept tucked away in an old book. It is alive and well in the choreography of a meal. The best piece of fish? That goes to the elders. The choicest slice of meat? Not for you. You learn early that respect is demonstrated not in words, but in who gets served first, who gets the tenderest cut, who gets the drumstick, who gets the fish cheek.

Love, duty, hierarchy. All of it is laid bare in a Lazy Susan spinning under oriental restaurant lights.

And then there is the quantity. The table groans under an empire of dishes. I smell Sunday mornings, family gathered around, all noise, steam, and gossip. Tea poured endlessly while bamboo steamers materialise on the table like edible magic. The infamous chicken feet, yes, gloriously gnawed around the little bones and nibbling the nails like nature’s toothpick. Every feast is built on the idea that abundance is the only respectable answer to hunger. Your belt becomes a distant memory, while your body negotiates with gravity.

But never seven dishes. Seven is for funerals. And nobody wants a eulogy at dinner.

In the West, one plate per person. Ordered, contained, politely individual. Maybe you steal a chip from someone if you’re kinky. Chinese food laughs in the face of that. Everybody reaches toward the centre. It’s a beautifully organised riot. It’s chaotic, intimate, and deeply communist.

And always the round table. Never rectangular if it can be helped. Because round means no hierarchy, no one marooned to the corners. Everyone visible. Everyone reachable. The food at the centre. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty elegant philosophy for living.

Then there are the ghosts.

The pumpkin spice lattes, orange and red hues scattering around. Autumn, in the West, belongs to you. Well, August in Chinese culture belongs to the Ghosts.

That was the month my mother — a devout Catholic with absolutely no problem keeping one foot planted in older, stranger territory — would sternly warn me not to stay out too late. The hungry spirits were wandering, she would whisper. The veil was thin. Don’t go looking for trouble. And for heaven’s sake, don’t tempt things. There is no bowl of fruit at the end of this road.

Blasphemous, I used to joke with her, which was usually followed by a scolding of respecting the forces you can’t explain, but know better than to mock.

The old country is there at the roadside. Incense hangs, medicinal in the air, fruit sits stacked for the unseen, and joss paper rises in singed black curls until you’re swatting money out of your eyes.

I will never understand it. Some lessons arrive as theology. Others arrive as “don’t be stupid.” And honestly, I’ve always loved that contradiction. The same household that gave me Catholic guilt also handed me a working respect that the world contains more things than the neat Western appetite for digestible explanations, which I so yearned for growing up. If nothing else, it keeps you humble. Or at least keeps you from stepping in the ashes.

To outsiders, maybe it all seems irrational.

But from the inside, it makes a strange and imperfect kind of sense.

Maybe my pride in being Chinese, if that is what it is, arrived later than it should have, somewhere around the time Asian stories in the West stopped being punchlines. Not caricatures, not the usual cheap mockery, but something closer to recognition. And now, with all this talk of being “met at a very Chinese time in one’s life,” I find I cannot sneer at it. It’s hilarious how the lunchbox contents that I was mocked for are now on £50 tasting menus on every major city’s high street.

There’s a strange ambivalence of gratitude and pride that my culture is being seen, whilst a suspicion that for some, this is less about understanding than aesthetic tourism with better tableware. Regardless, I welcome it, maybe more eagerly than I should. Call me naïve, but I would like to believe that most of it comes from a real curiosity (however clumsily) to learn.

As a sommelier of truth-seeking, I see an interesting, unanswered tension. Did I become proud of my culture because I matured? Or was it because the culture around me finally gave me permission to be? Was the shift internal, acceptance, growing up, and gaining perspective? Or external, where representation, visibility, and the culture are becoming “cool”? There’s a difference between “I grew into my identity” and “the world finally made space for my identity.”

I’m not sure. I remember watching Crazy Rich Asians. Chinese culture was aspirational rather than alien, contrasting with Mr Yunioshi. The mahjong scene, the food, the family dynamics, these weren’t footnotes or comic relief. They were the story. Sitting in that cinema and recognising your own family on screen. Not as a caricature, but as the protagonist.

And with the likes of Jimmy O. Yang, making the distinction between laughing at and laughing with. It triggers not shame but recognition. His comedy pokes fun at the absurdities of Chinese culture from the inside. The tiger parenting, the immigrant hustle, the wars waged over the bill. The things that used to make me cringe now make me laugh with warmth. That’s pride sneaking in through the back door.

Growing up Chinese means being raised in a world where love shows, not tells. Where food is language. Where duty sits at the table with you. Where superstition and practicality share a bed. Where family is less a soft place to land than a constant gravitational force. Maddening, comforting, impossible to escape.

And after enough time, enough distance, enough reminiscing, you realise something.

It was never just eccentricity.

It was culture. It was memory. It was care.

Served, as always, in a bowl.