№ 67: The Last Generation of Chinese Takeaway Kids
Growing up in a takeaway - Growth is always painful - Struggle is what makes us human
It’s 5:45 PM in Bromford, Birmingham.
A small ten-year-old boy sits cross-legged on top of a large chest freezer.
His head tilts down and brow furrows in concentration as he works out a non-verbal reasoning problem. He presses the pencil softly against the surface of the workbook, sketching out the different possible combinations, intently blocking out the whooshing sounds of wok and fire coming from the kitchen next door.
The phone rings behind the counter. “Hello, this is Bromford House Chinese takeaway. How may I help?”
The dinner rush begins. Endless customers pour into the takeaway to order Westernised dishes unheard of in China: Sweet and sour pork, sesame prawn toast, battered chicken balls.
The little boy lets out a sigh and emerges from his textbook to go into the kitchen to help out. Homework will have to wait until the dinner rush is over.
Family Life = Working Life
I was that child sitting on top of the chest freezer. One of many thousands of first/second generation immigrant kids who grew up in their family’s food business.
I filled containers of boiled rice, packed orders and tended to the deep fat fryers before graduating to the front of house when I was finally tall enough to see above the counter.
I can still feel the coarse chapped cuts on my thumbs from pressing down too many poly lids on silver containers. I can remember the pain of standing on my feet for 12 hours straight. And I can still recite the most popular takeaway people ordered.
These were the jobs that I did. Not because I wanted to, but out of necessity. Every weeknight, weekend, or school break, I’d chip in to help in hopes that one day in the distant future, we would no longer have to work so hard.
And as hard as it was, I now look back on the memories, even the painful ones, of takeaway life with immense nostalgia and feel a deep sense of gratitude for it all. It taught me some valuable life lessons and has shaped the person I am today. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was learning how to deal with people, how to problem solve on the go, how to navigate chaos and how to operate with ruthless efficiency.
Working in a takeaway, time becomes a blur of predictable monotony. Day in, day out, six days a week, 12 hours a day, it’s the same thing: you wake, you prep the food, you open the takeaway, you work to fill the orders on time, you deliver, you clean, you close, you tumble into bed and do it over and over again.
Weekends are workdays, not rest days. Going on holiday means a loss of income and costly expenditures. Apart from Christmas Day, holidays didn’t really exist. We simply didn’t do any business on the one day out of the year where you could count on most people to be cooking at home.
I never saw the takeaway as an “actual” place of work, it was just home, and this is what we did. Our family life was working together. Despite my parents eventually selling their takeaways and me pursuing my own path, this habit of blurring work and life together has remained with me.
Growing up in the roughest parts of Birmingham, life came with plenty of discrimination and amplified disrespect. People can become nasty. They’d swear and threaten to call the police or immigration over something stupid like a loose beansprout in their fried rice. They’d try their damn best to make it apparent they believe they’re better than you. It is much easier to see someone as a second-class citizen when their English is broken or their skin colour is different. My mother (who speaks English with almost native proficiency) never tolerated this abuse. She would hand back their money and tell them to leave.
The other takeaway kids whose parents couldn’t speak English well had it worse. Whenever customers got nasty, their parents couldn’t truly understand what was being said but got a sense of fear of what people might do. No matter how unfounded the allegations, in a vulnerable position of uncertainty and fear of repercussion, they defaulted to subservience.
Unfortunately, that was the way things were. Money was hard to earn and opportunities did not come easy.
Chinese takeaways — the product of our time
In 2021, I left London to move back to Birmingham. As I zoomed around the city, I noticed that there were fewer Chinese takeaways around.
I suspect the disappearance of takeaways is due to two reasons. The first is the rise in competition and quality from food delivery apps such as Deliveroo. It’s great how you can now get restaurant-quality food delivered to your door. Or how restaurants such as Dishoom have innovated the takeaway industry by setting up dark kitchens to service their takeaway demands.
This is the nature of business. It’s competitive. If you don’t grow, you’re regressing.
The second reason is that takeaway parents don’t want their kids to take over the business. My parents, and every other takeaway parent, worked hard so that I didn’t have to struggle as much as they did. They sacrificed their lives so that my brothers and I could achieve the social mobility in the UK that they had dreamt about.
Growing up, my mother was adamant that I get a white-collar job, particularly in finance, because it was an industry that would allow me to start with a good salary and have enough room for growth so that I could enjoy the work-life balance she never had.
Despite the goal of my parents, of every takeaway parent, is to have their children not have to work as hard as they did, the work mentality, the rejection of laziness, you carry that with you. It was the hardship itself and the fear of a harder life that fuelled us to propel forward and mobilise socially upwards.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but there’s a bittersweetness I feel seeing the takeaway industry innovate, but also Chinese takeaways and my uniquely shared childhood experience slowly fade away. The generation of Chinese takeaway kids is a product of our time and the society and politics of the West around it. It will never be replicated again.
Embracing and enduring struggle is the price we pay in hopes of a better life
I didn’t follow my mother’s wishes of finding a white-collar job and ascending the corporate career ladder. Growing up in the takeaway life, I inadvertently learned a different lesson. Perhaps the most important one of all.
My parents left Vietnam as it was being swallowed up by communism. They arrived in the UK, desperately trying to fit into society with few resources and options. Seeing them work extremely hard, overcome obstacles and eventually carve out a little successful life for themselves taught me that anything is possible.
But you have to take responsibility. You have to endure. You have to have the courage to take risks. The path to creating and building something, whether that is art, writing, a business, or a family, is difficult and full of risks.
Chances are it won’t even work out. But it’s challenging times that hardened people to be survivalists, to be resilient, and to persevere, despite the odds being stacked against them. There is a deep, fierce sense of pride that emanates from the battle scars of doing something challenging. The long hours, the missed opportunities, the hardship. Well-earned wisdom always comes from past struggles.
As takeout apps cause more Chinese takeaways to close down and our parents rejoice in us finding white-collar jobs, I’m not so sure it’s a good thing. There are second and third-order consequences of wanting your child to have an easy life. As Jeff Gregorek puts it, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” The work ethic, the drive and the struggle that made us thrive, these defining traits may be diluted on the path of certainty and comfort in future generations.
Struggle is just a natural part of life. It is what makes us human. We can’t escape it. But we have the right to choose our struggle and contend with it. Either that or life will assign a struggle for us.
So choose something worthy of struggle. Face your challenges. Push yourself to your limits and give it your all.
As Sigmund Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
— Jason Vu Nguyen
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