“To Love Your Family Is To Serve Your Family” — What I Learned About Love From My Italian/Chinese Heritage

When my visa to move overseas finally got approved, after many years and lots of false starts, I immediately called my mum and shared the exciting news. There was a brief pause, then Mum cleared her throat. ‘Well, before you move out I need to clean your apartment, and especially the exhaust fan above your stove, Linda. I bet it’s filthy and you won’t get your bond back otherwise,’ she said assertively, without acknowledging the momentousness of my news or the joy and relief I must be feeling after such a long process.

She told me she’d be over to help when I packed up my apartment in a few weeks. I sighed loudly into the phone. I wasn’t exactly surprised by her reaction: my family has always expressed their love through acts of service rather than affectionate words.

Growing up, I bounced between the parallel worlds of my Italian and Chinese heritage. While the two distinct cultures of my parents may seem at odds, given their geographical distance and very different histories, the truth is that their value systems and ways of communicating love are almost identical. In both cultures, serving others is not just an expectation, but also the most profound (and sometimes hilariously absurd) expression of love.

On my father’s side, the Italian side, every gathering centred around food — the most tangible emblem of love. My nonna orchestrated the most elaborate feasting scene in her home each week. All of us — my immediate family, plus my aunts, uncles and cousins — were there every single week. I looked forward to the menu so I could gorge myself on pasta al forno — gigantic tubes of rigatoni swimming in a rich, tomato and meaty sauce, showered in mozzarella and then baked in the oven. Or I could slurp up linguine with mussels, white wine and parsley, then sponge up the excess sauce with hunks of bread.

The kitchen would be packed with activity until the moment we sat down to eat. Every person had a role to play and there was a lively rhythm to it. From stirring the tomato sauce and adding in a few extra sprigs of basil to setting the table with precision, I understood that to love your family is to serve your family. To nourish is to nurture.

While my father’s family had immigrated to Australia together, my mother had moved to Sydney from a tiny Malaysian village on her own. We would visit her family in Malaysia over the Christmas holidays every year, and it was here that the symmetry between my Italian and Chinese-Malaysian clans was striking. Arriving at Po Po’s home was just like stepping into Nonna’s house, but with a new cast of petite, tanned Asians playing the roles of my boisterous family of food lovers.

Mum’s Chinese family prepared family dishes with the same pride as the Italians. It was a team effort, as everyone shuffled around the cool cement floor in their house slippers. The women did an identical dance as they manoeuvred around the kitchen. I would watch, mesmerised, as my aunt tenderly washed the rice while my mum chopped ginger next to her. The
happy knocking of a knife against a big wooden cutting board still brings comfort to my ears.

Once everything was laid out, we’d sit around the table eating sticky pork belly with pickles, stir fried oyster mushrooms with bok choy, and a whole steamed fish, covered with a sea of fresh coriander, ginger and chilli. Afterwards, the adults would step outside to crack open a stinking durian, while my brother and I devoured sweet glutinous rice balls and red bean buns.

The connection between acts of service and love holds even more weight when I consider the reasons behind my mum’s decision to leave this quaint place. Mum’s journey as an eighteen-year-old from the farming village she grew up in to the loud streets of Sydney’s Kings Cross was not fuelled by a desire to see the world. Nor was she escaping her familial duty. In fact, she was serving her family in the most direct of ways — pushing for a better life, not just for herself but also for her family back home. Mum left everything and everyone behind to serve her family. Sending money back to Malaysia became her ultimate act of service and sacrifice. An act of love that transcended borders, and exemplified a lifelong devotion to family.

When Mum met Dad a couple of years later, he brought her to Nonna’s house for the first time for dinner. She tells me that her English still wasn’t good, and neither was Nonna’s. They attempted conversation in broken sentences, but Mum proudly recalls that when dinner was finished, she stood up to help clear the dishes. This was how she won Nonna over. The ingrained value of respecting one’s elders and showing gratitude through acts like this was the same in Chinese culture as it was in Italian. Language barriers disappeared. Love was shown by attacking a pile-up of sauce-stained pasta bowls with a scrubbing brush.

My father was pulled out of primary school to begin working as a hairdresser, and he has always explained this as an act of “duty” to the family. He was ten years old. For decades, he has washed, cut and styled the hair of every person in our family. As a child and well into my teen years, he washed my hair twice a week. I would sit in an office chair in our laundry while my father carefully blow-dried my hair. I thought this was simply normal dad behaviour. Those moments, and even today when he trims my fringe, make up a great deal of our father-daughter quality time. Dad is retired now, but he refuses to stop serving us. He parks his car outside so he can set up his old hairdressing equipment in his garage. He still cuts my brother’s hair, and now my brother’s children’s hair too.

“You don’t think about your duty, you just do it,” Dad tells me over and over. His selflessness sometimes swings too far, and I worry that he’s doing too much as he’s getting older. When I’m wiping little annoying bits of hair off my face after getting a fresh fringe trim, I realise how much I will miss this loving ritual between us when he’s gone.

The concept of “famiglia” and family harmony is at the core of an Italian identity. Therefore every act of service shows loyalty, and every minute task I fulfil reminds me that I belong. It’s a love that is made tangible. I can taste it in the eggplant parmigiana wrapped up for me to take home, and Nonna can see it when I carefully wipe down the olive oil bottle before placing it back in the pantry. I feel it even when I’m annoyed that my mum insists on coming over to clean the exhaust fan above my stove.

I’ve recently realised that in both of my families’ cultures, the ability to serve is directly tied to self-worth. In her final years, as Nonna lived in a nursing home, I saw her sadness increase not as a result of her old age, but in her failure to serve me. Nonna would go on and on about not being able to “cook a me a something good.” Because she couldn’t serve me, she felt like she couldn’t love me properly. It broke my heart.

The week before I moved overseas, Mum came good on her promise to clean the greasy fan filters from the range hood above my kitchen stove. She came over two nights in a row, and stayed for hours while I packed up my small apartment. I had been frustrated during our initial conversation on the phone, when she’d seemed fixated on the cleanliness of my apartment above all else. But as we jigsawed around one another in the kitchen, I was grateful. We sat side by side on the floor wrapping glasses and bowls in old magazines, carefully placing them into a big box between us. She had been quiet for a while, a departure from her usual chatty self.

“Mum, are you alright?” I asked her softly, looking up at her. She averted her eyes and shook her head, her fingers curling paper around the edge of a glass. Then her voice broke as she replied, “Let’s not talk, okay Linda?” We wrapped the glasses at our feet in an emotional silence, taping up the box when we’d filled it. We stacked the boxes along one wall, ready for the removalists to take them to their new home. As she was leaving, Mum pressed a red Chinese envelope into my hand. I opened it and spied a few hundred dollars inside. “I don’t have very much money,” she said quietly. “But you can take this to buy something for yourself and think of me.” I wrapped her up in my arms and held her for as long as I could.