Interview with Julie Ma, author of Happy Families

Julie Ma is Welsh-Born Chinese after her Grandad settled there in the 1930s. After graduating from University and working away from home, she now owns her family’s Chinese takeaway with her brother in Wales and is also a debut author at the age of 51. Published in February 2021, Happy Families is the winner of the Richard & Judy Search for a Bestseller 2020. Viv and Karlie had the amazing opportunity to chat about her upbringing and the book in our podcast, But Where Are You From?, (and of course the golden question of Rice or Noodles?), but you can also read the conversation here.

Tell us about your takeaway background.

My takeaway has been here since the 1970s: my parents started it up - it's not entirely like the takeaway in the book. My parents ran it to raise a family and then my sibling and I were supposed to go away and get different jobs. I was working as a Customer Service Manager, but it didn't work out so I came back as a temporary arrangement to help out. Then my parents got ill and they passed away, and they kind of indicated that they would like the business to carry on for a bit, so we decided to do that. 

I think previously it would have been a bit embarrassing to say that I run a small takeaway, but over the last few years, especially since the pandemic, I came to realise that it's more important than you think: just because something hasn't been shown in a glamorous light in the media or in fiction, it doesn't mean it's not important.

We learn at the beginning that the protagonist, Amy Li, had another profession in Cardiff before moving back home to Cawsmenyn, and from other characters who recall her openly expressing dislike for being in the takeaway – this is a very common sentiment amongst takeaway children. How does this parallel your own experience?

For me there’s a parallel that when you're 18, you want to go away, and you’re supposed to go out and get a better job. When I came back to work here in the takeaway, I wanted to write. Unfortunately, whilst I'd love to say that writing this book came natural to me and that I didn’t need help, working here was a perfectly good way to earn that money to acquire the skills and have the time to focus. I would say to my parents “you’re working in a shop all the time, and we don't see you very much”, but they would say, “well we’re working to make the money so that you can have the things you want”. 

Did your parents know that you had aspirations to write? Were they still around when you were talking about wanting to be a writer?

I don't think so, no. I think writing has been a sort of quiet thing I've kept on the side - I have always written since I was a child, and I was told that I was quite good at it. 

The Cantonese switching in the novel is really relatable for those of us with a Cantonese upbringing. It's a form of representation that we haven’t seen in literature. Did you meet any obstructions or have any doubts in having the phonetic writing and translation of Cantonese, for example in including such phrases like ‘sei gweilo sing’ which you have translated as ‘bloody western ways’?
Yeah you even see this switching within the novel: at one point the character’s talking about the ‘gweilo’ [foreigner], and then she uses, ‘the British man’ or ‘the English man’, because the literal translation is a tiny bit offensive [ghost man], and she says “I found a more politically correct way of translating it”.

By the time I'd won the competition the publishers had decided that the book was good to go out and I didn't have any kickback about the switching. But if I hadn’t won the competition, who knows? It may have led directly to rejections, I don't know. I feel it's an important part of the colour of the novel. The main thing that worried me is that I’d gotten the spellings wrong as I had people come back to me saying “ye ye’s not spelt like that” but I was like, “Too bad. It's good enough”.

Yes, congratulations on winning Richard and Judy’s Search for a Bestseller competition! How does it feel for you, as someone who is Chinese and someone who is a first-time author?

It felt and continues to feel wonderfully amazing. It's not been an obstacle-free journey to publication but it is great to be up there with the other Chinese-British or Chinese-American writers like Asia MacKay, or Sue Cheung, or Celeste Ng. I think it's all an important part of the thing of being seen, either being seen because your characters are Chinese, or being seen because you are the writer and you're Chinese and you've written a book that includes lots of different people. So that's been brilliant.

In your novel we see that a story does not need to be exaggerated or extreme, that the everyday lives of the people who work at the takeaway have a rich history and drama to explore: for example, when we look at Ah Goong's journey and how he emigrated to Cawsmenyn, which is a very common theme amongst that generation of Hong Kong Chinese that moved over, and then became British Chinese.

There is a general feeling that it is a quiet story, but there did used to be a quite a dramatic subplot involving gambling - I weep when I think about the time I spent sitting in Ladbrokes researching this part of the story, where Amy’s dad gets involved in the gambling syndicate, and there's a real peril with the property and money and things. One of the times I sent it out, I was told the story is quite boring, so I had to work out which were the boring bits and I chose to take out that subplot. It seems to have worked and that perhaps, it was a bit clunky to have in. But yes, as a novel writer you do try to find the exciting, and sometimes it works out for you, and sometimes it doesn't. I would admit that it's a very ordinary story, really.

There were moments in the novel which featured acts of service and how that is expressed through food was very relatable: the way love is not overtly expressed between the family members, but we know it's there through those acts. In the book we see Amy's mum feeding Ah Goong congee while he's in hospital, do you feel like this is accurate with how your family expressed love growing up?

It's definitely accurate with my family. It goes back to what I said about my parents when I was saying how they were always busy. Saturdays are out of the question when you work in the takeaway profession so in my childhood there weren't so many Saturday excursions or anything with my parents. They would say, “Well, we showed our love by making the money so that you could go on that school trip, or have that book, or have that video game or whatever”. My family’s love is shown in a different way, but the importance of acting well by your parents, as opposed to just talking the talk, has been a thing going back as far as King Lear. There is a slight temptation to confuse things and think, “this is because we're Chinese isn't it?”, when really it might just be because we're a weird family. I don't know if your family was ever told to do those things like “don't wash your hair on New Year's Eve” and there's a bit in the book where they spend loads of time trying to find the right temperature for the water to drink. And you have to get some hot water and some cool water, and you tip it back and forth. Was that just us or was that a common thing?
The hot water thing? Yeah, absolutely.

So the thing is, I didn't know if these things were something only my family did or others did too but I'm glad to put those things out for other people to read about. I remember watching Ronny Chieng: International Student and in episode one Ronnie talks about his mum and her insistence on getting his humours right and everything by eating the right things and I was like “That’s its - it’s not just us, it's everybody!”. You don't know these things until they're presented for you to see.

We’re seeing more stories on the British Chinese takeaway pop up through podcasts and posts, sharing commonalities and differences, which in turn all feed into the rich tapestry of British Chinese history. There's a debate as to whether the takeaway can survive as it's no longer run by that generation of Hong Kongers, but now perhaps by immigrants from Mainland China. Further to that, the younger generation taking on takeaways may be changing the format that has previously existed. Do you think that the current format of the British Chinese takeaway can survive?

If you told me several years ago that this is what I would be doing now, I would have thought, there's not a lot of future in it. But like I said before, everywhere you go, you see takeaways everywhere, sometimes at the end of quite a residential street. I think the format will change slightly, I do notice these other places, these chains like Wok2Go and things - I think this shop to me is a community. We're part of the community: we know our customers by name, we know what they like when they walk through the door, we know what they want to order. I think there's always going to be room for that level of intimacy, more so now. 

There are two brackets of customers that come to our takeaway: the younger ones who come in, tap contactless, and go, and the older ones. The older ones like to come in, and some of them still try to come in with the old ten pound note and I have to say “I'm sorry, you have to give me a new ten pound note”. But there’s a whole thing about greeting people, I mean, even in the book we talk about some of our customers and how well we know them and their life, and I don't know if that happens when you run a big company, but because of that level of intimacy of knowing our customers, they’ve been so lovely and generous about the book. They come in and order their food and then they’d whip the book out from under their coat and go, “can you sign your book as well?”. That's been amazing. Yes, so they've been lovely.

I think there's a difference between when you go to a big supermarket there is a greeter and he gives a doughnut to the child if you have one (though you don’t really get these anymore). But in smaller shops, they really will give a donut to the child just because you come in and you’re a regular customer. Yeah, there's room for big shops and there’s room for small shops. 

Do you get customers who you know by order rather than their name? Like, ‘Oh it’s Mr Kung Pao Chicken!’?

Oh, yeah. We’d have standing orders - as soon as they walk through the door you know what they're gonna have, and sometimes, maybe once a year, they'll shock you by ordering something slightly different but my feeling is if you like it, just stick with it. In the book somewhere they’d go “Oh, he looks like Alan Sugar but younger” or “He looks like a fat David Cameron”, that sort of thing happens doesn't it?

Is there an order that you'll never forget? 

So more recently, we've had some elderly customers, who decided that they are only willing to eat one thing. There was an older lady and an older gentleman and they both liked chicken curry so we would actually set it up that they would have a chicken curry every single day brought to their door. We did say to the families “is this really what you want for them?”, and they said “They won't eat anything else - we prefer it if they eat a salad and some fruit and veg, but that's not gonna happen, so we will have this”. It was lovely. 

We got to know the older lady quite well: she was a lovely lady - she's passed away now but she was to take medication with her meal every day and her son brought these stickers in that said, “Mum, remember to take your pill, enjoy your meal, love [his name]”, and we stick it on with tape every day.

It just shows the level of community that you get from being a local Chinese takeaway that is so special - it’s the relationships that you develop in the community, as well as these personal stories.

When writing the book, how was it for you from an emotional perspective? Did it conjure up any forgotten emotions and memories, particularly in regards to when it touched on racism and identity? Were there any points where you thought this was bringing back some memories from when you were younger?

Yeah, it probably did - short of actual physical violence, there's been some pretty bad things that have happened, but I didn't touch too much on those. I tried to keep it fairly light because it's supposed to be a funny book. Some of the things in the book all seem to revolve around a cat in some way, the worst incidents. But yes, they do happen. And also, I feel that in a way, you depict things and you sort of validate them. So if I depicted something truly awful, I would have said, “Oh, you, random stranger, who did something truly awful, you inspired something truly awful, that I think is interesting enough to put in my book, and live on for a year or so after the event”. And I think, “No why should I? Whatever you did should just sink into obscurity and be forgotten forever”. So that's the decision I came to on that.

Yes, indifference is sometimes very powerful - like “We’re not going to talk about you because you don't even matter.”

I mean, sometimes I see things on social media where somebody gone up to somebody saying “Oh your English is terribly good”, and they've gone a bit beserk, which is what I would have thought when I was younger, but now I say, “Thank you very much - yours is good too.” and that usually shuts the conversation down. You’ve made the point nicely but sometimes they don't actually get it, in which case you have to find a way to back out. But normally [I try] not to be furious, but just to be indifferent. 

So this is quite a divisive question, Julie. It might be the hardest question that you will have been asked throughout your entire career: rice or noodles? 

Right when I thought about this, I thought that's noodles, isn't it? But I thought oh, “but what about when I'm ill or when I'm feeling a bit poorly and I want some jook, some congee?”. I still thought, up until about half an hour ago, I'll still go with the noodles because they are both pretty carby and really should be avoided, full stop. But... It's rice, I think, rice for the jook and the congee. I know you two are Team Noodles - I'm terribly sorry!

What's your favourite takeaway dish? And do you use numbers or do you have any nicknames for them?

So we use numbers - I can't tell you about the numbers in detail because that would give away the pin on my payment card. We still use the numbers as it’s handy but I saw on [Karlie’s] instagram that you've got something called ‘The Three Treasures’ and it sounds so amazing when you put it like that! We do have people ordering the three treasures we never called it that. We also have people asking us “Do you do a box meal?” and I was like, “It all depends on what you want in the box mate”. 

Up until recently, people used to ask for half and half rice and chips and I was always adamant that we don't do that sort of thing: you've got to be all or nothing, you've got to pick one, that was my feeling. My favourite meal depends from time to time. It's not very right of me to say that I like sweet and sour pork balls, but I do! They’ve fallen out of favour lately - I think it's because belly pork is quite a fatty cut of pork and people are very health conscious. But I still love it, even though it’s greasy and fatty: not cool to admit.

But it's a classic as sweet and sour pork is what sweet and sour originated from! Whereas in Britain people tend to order sweet and sour chicken balls, or they go for sweet and sour prawn - so the pork one is the classic one. 

Chicken balls is obviously the hilarious one isn’t it? If pork balls were called pig balls it would also be hilarious, but it's pork balls.

The love of food and the talk of food is so prevalent in certainly Chinese culture, and yes, it's so relatable. 

Food equals love, as they say.

Thank you Julie, we’ve had a great time chatting - everyone needs to buy Happy Families! 

Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. It really does mean a lot to think that even in 2021 we didn't realise that our stories were so common, and they are, and it's good! I want other people with their stories to come out and to find out that they're not alone as well. That's happened in lots of different ways with this book already, and I feel very pleased to play a small part in making people feel more seen.

Definitely a huge part and we can't wait to see more from you. Will there be any more for you? Do we know whether there's going to be any future plans and another book? 

We don't really know anything at the moment, I'm afraid but I'd like to! So we'll see how things pan out with this.

This interview was sponsored by Welbeck Publishing for the promotion of Julie Ma’s debut novel, Happy Families, Winner of Richard and Judy’s Search for a Bestseller 2020.
Thank you to our volunteer Clara for helping us with this article!