April 24, 2025

Restaurant Kid, by Rachel Phan

I was expecting…less?…from Rachel Phan’s memoir, Restaurant Kid. The story of growing up Chinese in a small town in Ontario, the experience of having the family business be the centre of domestic life, what it’s like having immigrant parents who give everything to their jobs in order to make enough money to give their children the kind of life they couldn’t have imagined growing up in in wartime Vietnam. I wasn’t expecting a memoir quite so intimate, so personal, and all-encompassing, but then I realized that this was the point—that where she came from would define everything for Phan. How she felt about her Chinese identity as a child in a community where racism was ordinary, how her parents were too busy to give her the attention she desired from them and so sought it elsewhere, how stereotypes of Asian woman would be part of her early sexual experiences, how her parents’ story would underline her own relationship with money and finances, and more. Restaurant Kid is capacious enough to hold Phan’s anger and resentment at some of her parents’ choices, but also her extraordinary love for them, and the sacrifices they made to give their children a life in Canada. I loved the whole book, but a particular highlight is the epic trip she takes to Vietnam with her parents once she’s in her 30s and her parents can afford to take time away from the business (which her brother runs now, a complicated inheritance, as most inheritances are). In Vietnam, she has the opportunity to see a different side of her parents, being at ease in their native tongue, at home and familiar even in this place that holds so many traumatic memories, and her ability to hold them and love in them in all their messiness and complexity is so extraordinarily moving. Which a rich and brilliant book.