Meet the kids who grew up in Chinese takeaways - BBC Stories

wherever there are chinese people in the world you'll probably find a takeaway [Music] in the 1950s immigrants from hong kong and the new territories came to the uk to start a new life by the 1970s chinese takeaways were big business with one in every town that's because families moved to avoid competition which meant that their children were often times the only chinese people in the whole school as the parents didn't always speak good english the children that grew up in the uk spent their childhoods helping out at the takeaways these are the takeaway kids [Music] hey what number is this that's the cantonese style one so that is 23a s19 on my menu if i remember correctly what about you 825 [Laughter] how special fried noodles one two five special charmaine is one a one a all the popular dishes were first she sees uh casual how old were you when you started working at the table between six and eight be um first just washing up love though nothing like major i wasn't actually tall enough so i had to get a little stool to kind of do the washing up one of the things i did when i was like 12 years old was pushing the containers down for foods oh and we used to we used to like once once you go to the frying pan you dish up by putting in a container and as a kid my job was to sort of get the lids and press it down which doesn't seem like a big job but when you're a kid you think yeah i'm growing up now and i remember how hot the food was because it was so fresh my parents came to the uk probably late 60s early 70s they came over from from hong kong and worked in family restaurants built up their money savings to buy their own place so when i was seven years old i was peeling prawns it's a never-ending task but it's a fulfilling task you do it for for the love of the family the least favorite job was peeling potatoes me and my brother we both did that after school and it was in a very run down very basic brick out house without any sort of heating or insulation we'd have to wear thick coats whilst handling knives in the cold and it was damp and we could be in there for a few hours before we'd finish sometimes i would really hope that we would get an order wrong just so that means there'd just be food left over that we thought i could eat yeah when i was a kid you'd have little christmas buffets and stuff every kid would bring something in i was always the kid with the prawn crackers were you quite popular then yes always the prawn cracker kid everyone else brought sausage rolls and stuff like that it was about 12 years old and i was working in front of their takeaway trying some chips and we've got this huge metal frying range two massive compartments filled with oil for france it's about 330 degrees those friendships minding my own business what i neglected from them was there's two there's a metal lid that covers that actual frame range i didn't lock it in place i just ran away hand so halfway into that thing the lid slides down before i know it's clamps down right there ah i screamed say the leaves but literally scarred for life everyone's got scars physical scars mental scars you know emotional scars when it comes to certain techniques about how to fly fish especially when you're dealing with oil that's 300 degrees and you're a teenager you know you have to it's a bit weird like when you get fish you have to put it right at the surface of the oil you can't throw it because if you throw it this flashback will hit you and when we fry chips we don't fry like a small portion we find like a massive bucket full and the technique that i was taught is that you're meant to pour it in as a kid it terrifies you because you will get burnt and you just think that it's going to splash back at you and i hated it i hated working at a flyer [Music] growing up i wanted to go out you know go out to my friend's house but i couldn't because i had a job you know on thursday nights and i was sent to there i was into the fact that i had to work on a friday night like if i was if i was going to meet some friends at a past party i smell like fish and chips because that's where i've been working i had to finish school i go to the takeaway help out do my homework and adopted my day done and then the next day when we go to school i hear my friends talking about this great house party they've been to and i'm just like oh okay you know i was working but okay you know too bad i can't be there [Music] i have actually been asked out over the counter a couple of times and that's been a bit awkward because you can't just leave after saying no because you're still serving them how does that happen to you thinking back to it it's kind of creepy because i was really young i was probably like 16 17 and there would be this guy that came in um he asked me to marry him like i was like i can't i'm 16. i think i was about 16 or so i was like you know busting orders back on the boards and there's uh three ladies i think probably like 35 40. and they're like trying to call my name you know how you doing i was like uh yeah i was a bit busy i'm sorry one point heard them oh if i was 20 years younger okay i think i'm gonna stand back in the kitchen did you stay there until they left then i hid no shame in that in the takeaway where i'm standing is at the front and then the kitchen is behind me so when i take the phone orders it's quite loud so i was on this phone call for probably about 10 minutes trying to get the order down she was obviously getting really agitated she was just like um can you please just get someone that can speak english on the phone please there's strange microaggressions or passive racism that happens in takeaways customers who come in to the restaurant or this fish and chip shop and they tell me about oh my son yes he's going to china to study chinese and being a 15 year old boy i'd like i had no idea what to say about that except for hmm that's good i'm not from china i'm from bloomberg the thing is about being a takeaway child is that when you set up business you don't set up like a place next door competition you're generally isolated from other chinese people so growing up generally we don't see other chinese people but we just want to be like everyone else but we're not because we're the only chinese people in that town so you can see all of it from both sides so the english-speaking size and you know if you speak cantonese or mandarin how does it make you feel as the kids of that my parents would try and shield me away from it all and just usher me off you know just to quickly move because they they knew what was going on they just wanted to protect me at the time to not listen or hear about it when i was about nine years old my father had a encounter with two hostile customers they demanded a portion of chips you know quite bluntly say can i have a portion chipset and my father said yep no problem you know kind of a pound please and that repeated a few times and then until the customers got quite angry and even more verbal and it escalated to the point where these two gentlemen spat on my barber's face it's just not not pleasant near that age and it's you feel kind of powerless when you're seeing your parents go through something like that there is quite a common stereotype of chinese people being quite timid quite passive and unwilling to stick up themselves for the fear of confrontation as i grew up i got a little bit angry about it because i thought to myself you know it shouldn't be like this but you know my dad wasn't being rude to them especially when they make fun of your vase it hurts it's something that's really quite deep about it because you can't change the fact that my mum has an accent you know we get prank calls which is a big thing because kids which you find out funny just to call up the local takeaway or the fish and chip shop and just put on a chinese accent and say you know i want to order dog or something like that and it's horrible has it ever happened to any of you guys prank calls and takeaway yeah definitely and the sad thing is it's still happening to this day and you know back then you could potentially say okay maybe they've just not had enough education because you know chinese people are new in this country etc but this day and age there isn't really an excuse anymore sometimes our parents don't necessarily understand either so it's a case of they're being taken out the mickey out that hurts sometimes more the fact that because we were born here and we understand the context of oh dude or the dog we know why that's racist but our parents they generally just think it's just kids being kids in the world our parents are meant to protect us but in some ways we protect them by not telling them why what they did was wrong so it's kind of a lot responsibility on a teenager growing up to tell you know not to tell your parents why that person was racist but in your heart you know what they did was terrible i used to have regular customers every friday night they don't need to say anything they'll just knock on the window give me a thumbs up i exactly know what they want and exactly what time that they're going to come after they've been i don't have a few bevvies even on the phone you could just you just knew who it was and you would already have it and you'd say yeah usual time and they'd know and that that was it for the phone call didn't even have to say anything when a customer doesn't come in for a while you do kind of think i hope they're okay and then when they come back you're like oh thank god they're okay sometimes we have regular customers but we don't actually know their names because after like five years it's a bit odd to ask someone uh by the way what's your name so we're just calling by the one that orders like oh it's mr haddock man you know knocks in the window we go hello mom mr haddock man what's the haddock i did have this one guy came in every day to order one cup of curry sauce and he would drink it no i thought it was so strange but it looks like you've got something to do because i used to have a customer that every winter time old lady right she said forget your flu jabs forget everything else she said i just buy your curry sauce and that sorts me out throughout the whole winter and i haven't seen that since there'll be times where because i was front of the house that was probably the time where i can do my homework and it was quite nice that there'll be some customers while they were waiting they might peer over the counter and sort of think oh let's have a look at your homework some of them might sneak in the actual answers themselves [Music] it's not as special anymore because you can just get a chinese so easily now back then you didn't have a delivery you rang to collect or you walked in to order right then there and it wasn't until i was about 15-16 and we thought you know it'd be really good to deliver we had to buy a map of the town and stick it on the wall so whenever someone ordered we just had to look up on the map right what where is it is it in d7 or e7 and so on and then you just essentially have to remember the route as well because you couldn't take the entire map with you people don't realize how long those places open for 12 o'clock to 2 o'clock for the lunch time but then 5 o'clock is opening time my parents they worked until 11 o'clock and growing up i hardly see them you never felt unloved by them or anything and you kind of could get why they weren't there but at the same time you couldn't help but want them to be around where the counter is there's this empty space and i used to actually take a little stool i'd sit there and essentially i kind of come out when it wasn't too busy and there would be staff that would play with me as well when my parents moved to the uk they opened up the takeaway because that was the kind of job that they could actually get by rights my dad is a carpenter and the only thing that he could next progress on was to cook the food along with my mum and at the time the uk didn't have that much of a takeaway business and this is where we all kind of started out my parents worked really hard just like everyone else um and i saw that just because i never saw my dad he was always at work but i feel that they've given me everything they've done their best to give me everything and i kind of just feel like really lazy in comparison to that now they spent pretty much all of their time at the takeaway and my mom helped out whenever she could she had to take us to school and take us to piano lessons and swimming lessons and dance lessons i feel like they worked extra hard to just fit that all in for us they've come really fast so i'm really proud of where they are now my mother actually stayed on her feet for 13 14 hours a day and it really does make you appreciate how how lucky we have it that our parents you know sacrificed a lot in their early lives to to build up what we have known you know we were given the opportunity to go to college to go to university and you know a lot of people giving head starts because of their parents hard work my parents came to this country with nothing they were immigrants they weren't really educated at university or anything like that they didn't have any skills and if anyone works in catering within the restaurant industry or fish and chips or chinese restaurant or takeaway you know how hard it is to make money and they've done a lot to sacrifice their life for us to have a better life wow

Channel: BBC Stories

Views: 1,440,153

Keywords: chinese takeaways, takeaway kids, chinese takeaway, chinese, takeaway, bbc stories, british chinese, chinese takeout, documentary bbc, growing up, chinese food, documentaries, documentary, bbc news, sweet and sour, chinese culture, british born chinese, china, british, Asian Britain England, Childhood, Asian, Ethnicity, Race, BBC, east asian

Id: Ii9o8B_9sXo

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 26 2019