Growing up in a Chinese takeaway left Chris Tse with a deep appreciation for his parents’ hard work – and a years-long aversion to sweet and sour pork.
My partner once made the observation that when my family and I reminisce about a holiday or some significant moment, we tend to fixate on the food we ate. I guess it’s because we’ve always been around food – not just in our homes, but in the many restaurants and takeaways my parents and extended family ran for decades. Food wasn’t just our livelihood, it was our connection to each other and community, a way of celebrating our culture – although I’d come to appreciate this much later, when I was no longer a surly teenager forced to work in the family shop.
In 1979, before I was born, my parents and two of their close friends opened Lower Hutt’s first authentic Chinese restaurant, the Ming Dynasty. Although there were already restaurants and takeaways in the Hutt that offered some Chinese dishes, they were an afterthought to their main offerings of steak dinners, burgers, and fish and chips. My parents and their friends, all first-time business owners, wanted their restaurant to be 100% Chinese cuisine, particularly Hong Kong-style dishes that Dad had grown up eating and missed since moving to Aotearoa.
It didn’t take long for the restaurant to take off thanks to strong word of mouth and the exclusively Chinese menu. As well as introducing traditional fare like steamed whole fish, there was room on the menu for oddities like banana chicken roll, which sounds like something you’d find on TikTok: a banana wrapped in thin slices of chicken, crumbed, then deep fried and served with a sweet and sour-style sauce. Encouraging diners to try something new wasn’t difficult, but there were other aspects of a Chinese meal that had to be explained, like using chopsticks, family-style sharing, and ordering a balanced selection of dishes rather than, say, five variations from the black bean sauce section of the menu.
Although the restaurant struggled with the lunch service, evenings were regularly fully booked with lengthy waitlists and queues out the door. The demand was so great that after a couple of years the restaurant’s dining area was expanded to the second floor, doubling the seating capacity and allowing for functions in a private dining room. Over time the Ming Dynasty became a local favourite with support from loyal regulars and the occasional celebrity like All Blacks Bernie Fraser and Stu Wilson.
My own memories of the restaurant are hazy, mostly derived from my parents’ stories and family photographs of special occasions held there, like 滿月 banquets for me and my brother (a celebration held to mark a newborn’s first month) and my 公公’s 60th birthday party. I was too young to understand what went into running the restaurant, but I knew it was a special and important place because of its prominence in our lives. These days, there’s a more tangible reminder in my own house in the form of four dining chairs, which were custom-made for the restaurant.
Eventually, the long hours and my parents’ desire to spend more time with me and my younger brother, who was about to start school, prompted them to sell their share of the restaurant. It wouldn’t be long before they found themselves back in the game with a new venture: a stall in the Queensgate Mall food court.
When the food court opened in 1991 after the mall’s first major expansion, each stall was given a perfunctory name by mall management. Along with our “Asian” stall, there was “Seafood”, “Coffee and Desserts”, “Carvery”, and “Sandwiches”. They were also given the same minimalist fit out, which gave the food court a clean if underwhelming ambience. I suppose this uniformity gave each stall a level playing field – there were no attention-seeking signs or fast food chains to compete with (these would come a little later when the mall was expanded again in the early 2000s).
With the mall venture, my brother and I soon became much more aware of the family business and its impact on our daily lives. After school we tagged along with Mum or Dad as they ran errands like banking or picking up supplies. On the weekends, if we weren’t being looked after by grandparents or cousins, the mall became our playground. We were the resident mall rats, begging the staff at Farmers to let us have a hoon on a Sega Mega Drive or flicking through every magazine at the London Book Shop. If we were feeling particularly brave, we’d leave the confines of the mall to spend our pocket money at the arcade a couple of blocks away.
Even though the hours weren’t as punishing as the restaurant’s, there was still everything else that had to be done after hours: invoices, wages, tax returns, rosters, and a seemingly endless stream of aprons and tea towels to wash. While I didn’t resent my parents always being so busy with the food court, there was a part of me that wished they had “normal” jobs that allowed them to switch off after work, and enjoy weekends and public holidays.
This wish for normalcy grew stronger once I was old enough to help out. It started with peeling vegetables and washing dishes, before I was trusted to serve customers or cash up the till at the end of the day. My frustration with not being able to hang out with friends after school or on the weekends was a sore point. My friends, on the other hand, thought I had the best life because I could eat all the Chinese food I wanted. But the truth is, being around sweet and sour pork and chow mein all the time put me off Chinese takeaways for the longest time. Surprisingly, nowadays I have an unhealthy obsession with eating all the sweet and sour pork I can get my hands on. Maybe it’s a late appreciation for it, or deep down it reminds me of those days when I got to spend so much time with my parents.
I always knew Mum and Dad worked hard, but it’s only as an adult with responsibilities of my own that I realise how exhausting it must’ve been to juggle work and family, even when the two were so intertwined. Now I realise what a gift my parents gave me – a strong work ethic and, of course, an appreciation for food and cooking. Like many parents in their position, they never wanted my brother and I to follow in their footsteps. Their wish was for us to get a good education and find careers that would allow us to have the work-life balance they never had.
I don’t remember our first day at the food court, but I do remember our last. The mall was being closed for yet another expansion, so we had to move out all our belongings and clean the place. We were tired and emotional after a full day’s work, punctuated by friends and regulars stopping in for one last meal and to say goodbye. Dad removed a pair of giant chopsticks that had been added to our signage at some point over the years and pretended to pick something out of the empty bain-marie with them. It’s one of my most endearing memories of our time and a reminder that even when we were busy and stressed we still found ways to make each other laugh. They were strange days, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
