Growing up Welsh and Chinese in the South Wales Valleys

Growing up, Wales felt suffocating in a way that was hard to explain. The former coal-mining village where our Chinese takeaway was based was both a blessing and a curse, a tight-knit community where news travels fast, and everyone knows each other. We know each other’s business, but we also look out for one another. Being Chinese in a place where people shared the same surnames, circles, and skin colour often felt like everyone was in on the joke except you, leaving me and my family visible and invisible at once. I understood early on that I existed slightly out of step, with a target on my back. Whether at school, at the shop, on weekly trips to Cardiff wholesalers, at the local Chinese restaurant for dim sum, or at Sunday Chinese school, moving between English, Welsh, and Cantonese, I learned to shape-shift depending on who was asking.

Wales gave me my most formative years. The deafening rush of Friday night orders shouted over the hum of woks, fryers, and extractor fans. The heat and pressure of trying to get everything out on time. Closing up, deep cleaning stray grains of fried rice, counting the day’s takings, and the quiet satisfaction of a long shift done. It gave me a closeness and sense of community I didn’t fully understand until much later in life. Loyal customers whose orders I knew by heart, staff who became family and helped my brothers and me with homework and neighbours who watched us grow up.

For me, food was where life coalesced. Being Welsh and Chinese meant I grew up in a space of constant code-switching. I swapped cupped hands of egg fried rice my mother packed in a flask for my friends’ corned beef sandwiches and crisps at lunchtime. Summers were spent in Hong Kong with extended family, around long dim sum meals with towering steamer baskets to open. Before service, my parents still found time to cook for family meals, whole steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, double-boiled pork bone soups, and plates of pak choi heavy with garlic. I watched them adapt, adding chicken balls, chips, and prawn toast alongside chow mein, chop suey and sweet and sour pork, not as a compromise but as survival, learning how to feed a community unfamiliar with the flavours and textures of their homeland.

At the time, I didn’t see it that way. I rejected it. I didn’t want to follow my parents into hospitality. I associated food with arguments and long hours. If only they didn’t have to cook so much, they’d have more time for us. If only we got every order right, we wouldn’t bicker so much. If only we didn’t live above a takeaway, maybe I would fit in. If only I hadn’t spent evenings pressing down cartons of shredded crispy beef until my thumbs split and bled, would I have felt any sense of autonomy? Looking back, I see how narrow that thinking was. Food shaped everything, and I tried to escape it, but it made me. It taught me the value of effort, the patience behind skill, the importance of teamwork and how recipes and stories are passed down and changed over time.

For a long time, I kept parts of myself separate. Welsh belonged to one version of me, Chinese to another. I had to leave to find my own direction, and only when I returned, older and a food writer, did it begin to make sense. Wales once held anger and shame for me. It felt like somewhere you had to escape. You grow up thinking you have to leave and not look back. Now I see it differently. There is beauty in the hardness. Wales gave me my grounding. It shaped how I cook, how I write, how I see the world. Looking back now is about understanding, not distance.

Every time I return to Wales, I find something new. The food scene feels more confident, more sure of itself. Chefs are drawing on what’s around them while staying open to the wider world. There is pride, but also momentum, hunger and intent. Wales no longer feels like somewhere I had to leave behind, but something I carry with me wherever I go.