If The British Born Chinese Grew Up Working In A Takeaway, Are They Going To Take The Reins Of The Business?

The façade of a Chinese takeaway can be recognised in every city or town in the UK. They are the businesses that never let you down by closing up shop on special public holidays. But what the customers don’t often see are the people who work tirelessly in the clangour and heat of woks, with searing aluminium food containers.

There are children of immigrant parents in these places, young enough to be warned to steer clear of dangerous knives in the kitchen.

Nicole Cheng was one of those children.

“I hated my role”, she sighs with displeasure. “Working at the counter, taking orders, picking up the phone. Dealing with the front of the place. I hated it.” Her parents owned several takeaways around the UK — Nottingham, Winchester and Kent. She was living above them until she was eight years old. Now, both her parents, although no longer working together as owners, offer their labour in positions such as being front-of-house and chef at their friends’ businesses.

The majority of Chinese takeaways are owned and run by a single-family unit. Normally, they start up as a “husband-and-wife team” for a few years. After the birth of sons and daughters they are shuffled into the work force when they were capable enough to lend a small helping hand, writes Benton and Gomez in their book The Chinese in Britain.

Nicole resented her parents for this reason.

“Not only did I have to work for my family, they were quite protective of me,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to go to friends’ sleepovers, so I felt like I was missing out a lot with my social life. I especially hated helping prepare the food before the takeaway opened: wrapping prawn cakes, cracking eggs, peeling prawns — I hated all of that.”

This familial labour usage of their children has advantages of which the kids may be completely unaware. It offloads the pressure from parents piled on by the task of food preparation and cleaning. Hiring part-time or even full-time workers outside of the family is not a common procedure. It is avoided in part to slash non-familial wages and in part distrust in their cultural inability to match with the relentless kitchen work. Families turned to a sole reliance on family labour. However, this fenced business model meant that parents lacked social skills to interact with the wider urbanised society.

Benton and Gomez described the takeaway as a “trap” borne out of oppression and self-exploitation within the family. The children normally received the full force of the effects.

“If I was to be asked to carry on working or owning my own takeaway, it will feel like a trap” Nicole confirms. “It doesn’t lie with my passions because I am more of a creative person. I don’t want to be stuck in one place.”

Takeaway children were in front-row seats to the stage of inner working life of their families. Customers on the other side rarely get so much as a glimpse of the life behind the bustling air. It is possible that the industrious wok clangs and the violent crackling oils mask the young children’s voices. Or, the commands were in a foreign language that prevented the customers of ever becoming aware of what was really happening.

When these young workers incurred more responsibilities in their family’s absence, the enormity of the job, the physically battering responsibilities, dawn on them.

“My uncle does the fried rice and at one point he had to go back to Hong Kong for a family emergency”, Patrick Li said. “So, I had to fill in for him in the kitchen and that happened a few times. That was an eye opener. I didn’t even have his full responsibilities. I only had to work in the evenings and sometimes during the day but that was quite stressful in itself.”

The chefs stand on their feet all day, tossing steel woks and ladles. Frying food spits oil and sears your exposed skin to oil with wasp-like pricks. On the busiest days of the week– Friday and Saturday — it is relentless cooking and washing, back and forth to the sink and gas hob.

One day off from work is the parents’ escape the “trap” but adult responsibilities follow everywhere — cleaning the house, the toilet, the kitchen, looking after the children. It is back-to-back work seven days a week.

“I could see how it took a toll on their relationship and just their well-being in general”, Nicole said of her parents. They were both so invested in keeping their business afloat and to earn enough money to support their daughter, quality family time was compromised or forgone all-together. “I think they missed out a lot of mine and my brother’s achievement growing up and not much celebration.”

It is invariably seen as an honourable attitude to help out family in times of hardship. Takeaway owners and their children, however, are hit with double exclusion in British society: the occasional involuntary assistance in running a family business and the geographical isolation of the takeaways themselves.

Restaurants, on the other hand, tend to crowd in places such as China Town in London, to build economic strength. They also gradually develop a reputation as a meeting area for the Chinese and tourists.

But takeaways don’t abide by this strategy. Isolationism is their policy.

This policy, however, is self-imposed. They had no other choice for survival. The food sold Chinese takeaways are almost identical so to keep fierce competition down, keeping physical distance between each other is the best kind of win-win policy for everyone involved.

This isolation throws a very bad ball into the School court because the children were normally the only or one of the few, ethnic minority members in their schools.

As parents approach retirement and no longer having the wherewithal to stand the pressure of working in the takeaway, there comes an inevitable moment where the fate of the business has to be decided.

Are these second- and third- generation immigrant children going to carry on the business? Or, are they going join the professions and shed away this element of their British Chinese culture?

Patrick has been ruminating over this dilemma for a long time.

His family have owned the takeaway close to seventy-five years. Originally it was opened by his grandparents and passed down to his Mother, finally to his Aunt. Now, he is the youngest member along with his younger cousin to be helping out there, still.

“My family asked me to help and I helped. That’s what family is for.”, he says.“You ask for help and you are supposed to get it or give it.”

Linda, Patrick’s single mother, sacrificed her livelihood for the well-being of her only child, for some footing into the higher outside professional world. Giving him the chance to escape the confined grounds was all she wanted.

She didn’t enjoy the job. Who enjoys the scarring spits of hot oil whilst deep frying chips? he would say. The long hours made the the work tiresome. She often came home very late into the night only to be too exhausted to do anything else.

“My mum didn’t work so hard to put me through school just for me to end up back where she is” he says. He received a first-class honours degree in Forensic Science at Kent University and is now studying Green Chemistry at Imperial College, London, working closely with solar cells.

He explains, “I like the idea that I can contribute towards making the world a bit of a greener place. And, I figured if I am going to devote my life to anything it may as well be that.”

The memories of the takeaway are vital for these kinds of reflections. Looking back over his shoulder of his past and comparing to where he is now, his journey arc impacted him. He feels nothing but pride.

“She did what she did so I could have a better life and, not only that, I didn’t study so hard to then just go back to frying chips in the deep fryer or cooking fried rice. I didn’t stay up endless nights revising for University level exams to get a First-Class degree to then just go back to a takeaway.”

Escaping the takeaway “trap” was the only way to elevate in UK society, he believes, even though he brushed with bankruptcy by living and studying in London.

A disadvantage a Takeaway child has is related to their parents’ position as working-class members of society, despite their business status as ‘self-employed’. Parents can work and earn twice as hard to have the money to purchase better opportunities, but their restricted circle of professional contacts affect their children’s success to some extent. Their relations with UK society and its majority culture are completely different.

“We don’t have the same opportunities as some White kids with middle class parents” he says.

“My Mum can maybe put in a good word with the local plumber that’s a good customer but it is nothing compared to some kids at school who have parents that are lawyers or bankers that can get them a summer part-time job at their offices or something. I will never be able to get that kind of work experience.

“Nothing was given to me on a plate. I came from a fairly uneducated family. My mum couldn’t even help me with fractions when I was in Year 3” he says. “Her educational knowledge stopped after Year 2, so from then on it was all me. I had to work hard to achieve those grades. It wasn’t in my genes to be clever.”

He is worred about his own children in the future. It wasn’t money as much as it was how their cultural identity will be formed when they become adults. They will potentially live through a culture he himself won’t be able to recognise as a first-generation British Born Chinese.

It is a unique sub-culture in itself, he believes, an ideology that doesn’t quite fit in with Hong Kong or China. His future son or daughter, long after their father has left behind the takeaway to become a Green scientist, will no longer experience the Takeaway bustle.

“I had a dream where it was the future and I was married and had kids. And I was telling my grandkids about my childhood and about how I worked at the takeaway. And in the dream, I looked back at it fondly.

“I was working with my family. I got to see my mum and there is never going to be an environment where I can do that other than this one. That dream really changed my perspective. My mum worked tirelessly to provide for me and to ensure that I had a really good upbringing.”

It is true that Nicole hated how working at a young age interrupted her childhood. Working against one’s will breeds resentment and frustration, but, with maturity, she started to understand the Why and the How of her parents’ motives. She understands though, why, with her parents’ responsibilities in running the takeaway, they missed out on family time. “I understand they tried their best and as a kid you wouldn’t understand these things.”

As time passes, as new generations come into the family picture, cultural intensity will dilute. As the grandchildren of takeaway owners are born their contact with the heritage culture fades and disappears.

British Born Chinese children in the near future will possibly never set foot in a takeaway again but lessons in other parts of their culture can compromise for this disappearance. The children of takeaway owners — like Nicole and Patrick — will, hopefully, have established their domain in the professional middle-class of British society, finding their sense of belonging and value.

The woks, the ladles, the smell of the deep fryer, prawns, the nagging of impatient, rude customers — these experiences will only survive with their parents and grandparents of the future. The Takeaway culture may breath its last breathe and die with them.

Patrick and Nicole’s future children, perhaps, will only hear about them through tales of the long distant past.