Where there are Chinese people in the world, you'll probably find a takeaway.
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 their children were oftentimes the only Chinese people
in the whole school.
As the parents didn't always speak good English,
the children who grew up in the UK spent their childhoods
helping out at the takeaways.
These are the Takeaway Kids.
Hey! What number is this?
That's the Cantonese style one, so that is 23A.
It's 19A on my menu, if I remember correctly.
What about you?
I think that was A25.
House special fried noodle.
Mm, 125.
Special chow mein is 1A.
1A?
All the popular dishes were first, you see, so...
Kaz, how old were you when you started working at the takeaway?
Between six and eight, first just washing up, 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 that I did, when I was, like, 12 years old,
was pushing the containers down for food.
And we used to, like, once we got the frying pan you dish up by
putting it 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 a grown-up now!"
And I just remember how hot the food was, cos it was so fresh.
And you'd go, "Oh, ah! Oh, ah!" Like that.
My parents came to the UK probably late '60s, early '70s.
They came over from, uh, from Hong Kong.
And worked in, uh, 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 favourite 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 outhouse,
without any sort of heating or insulation,
we'd have to wear think 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 I could eat.
When I was a kid, you'd have little Christmas buffets
and every kid would bring something in -
I was always the kid with the prawn crackers.
Where you quite popular, then?
Yes, always the prawn cracker kid.
Everyone else brought sausage rolls and stuff like that.
I think I was about 12 years old and I was working for the takeaway,
frying some chips.
And we've got this huge, metal frying range.
Two massive compartments filled with oil,
for frying it was about 330 degrees.
So I was frying chips minding my own business.
What I neglected to remember was that there's a metal lid that covers
the actual frying range.
I didn't lock it in place, I was just frying away, hand sort of
halfway in to the actual thing.
Lid slides down, before I know it it's clamped right there. Ohh.
I screamed, totally, but...
Literally scarred for life.
Everyone's got scars. Physical scars, mental scars, you know.
Emotional scars. Emotional scars.
When it comes to certain techniques about how to fry 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 the splashback will hit you
and when we fry chips we don't fry, like, a small portion, we fry, like,
a massive bucketful. Yeah.
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's going to splash back at you.
And I hated it - I hated working at a fryer.
Growing up I wanted to go out, you know, go out to my friend's house,
but I couldn't cos I had a job, you know, on Thursday night.
And I resented it, I resented
the fact that I had to work on a Friday night.
Like, if I was going to meet some friends at a house party,
I'd smell like fish and chips,
because that's where I'd been working.
I would finish school, I'd go to the takeaway, do my homework, help out
and end up, my day done. And then the next day I'd go to school and
hear my friends talk about this great house party they'd been to.
And I'm just like, "Oh, OK. You know, I was working, but...
"OK, you know. Too bad I can't be there."
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.
Has that happened to you?
Thinking back to it, it's kind of creepy, cos 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.
Did he? But, like, I was like, "I can't, "I'm 16."
Think I was about 16 or so, I was, like, you know, bussing orders
backwards and forwards and there was three ladies, I think probably
about 35/40 and they're, like, trying to call my name.
You know, "How you doing?" And I was like, "Oh, I'm a bit busy, "I'm sorry."
One point I heard, "Oh, if I was 20 years younger I'd have him."
I'm like, "OK!"
Think I'm going to stay in the back, in the kitchen for a while.
Did you stay there until they left, then?
Oh, yeah. I-I hid.
No shame in that.
In the takeaway where I'm standing is at the front and then the kitchen
is behind me. PHONE RINGS
So when I take the phone orders it's quite loud.
So I was on this phone call for probably about ten minutes,
trying to get the order down.
She was obviously getting really agitated.
And she was like, "Um, can you please just get someone who can
"speak English on the phone, please?"
There's strange micro-aggressions or passive racism that happens in takeaways.
Customers who come into the restaurant or the fish and chip shop
and he'd tell me, "Oh, my son, he's going to China to study Chinese."
And being a 15-year-old-boy, I had no idea what to say about that,
except for, "Mm, that's good."
I'm not from China, I'm from Bromley.
The thing is about being a takeaway child, is that when you set up
businesses you don't set up in a place,
like, next door to the 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 side 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.
Cos they... They knew what was going on.
They just want to protect me, at the time, to not listen
or hear about it.
When I was about nine years old,
my father had an encounter with two hostile customers.
Um, they demanded a portion of chips, you know,
quite bluntly saying, "Can I have a portion of chips, please?"
And my father said, "Yeah, no problem."
You know, "Can I have a pound, please?"
And that repeated a few times until the customers got quite...angry
and even more verbal.
And it escalated to the point where these two gentlemen
spat at my father's face.
It's just not pleasant... at 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 for 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.
You know, my dad wasn't being rude to them especially.
When they make fun of your face it hurts.
There's something that's really quite deep about it,
cos 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 will just find that 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 that ever happened to any of you guys? Prank calls on the takeaway?
Yeah. Definitely and the sad thing is it's still happening to this day.
And, you know, back then you could potentially say, "OK, maybe they've
"just not had enough education, because, you know, Chinese people
"are new in this country, etc."
But in this day and age there isn't really an excuse any more.
Sometimes our parents don't necessarily understand either.
So it's a case of they're being taken the mickey out of.
That hurts, sometimes, more.
The fact that, cos we were born here and we understand the context of,
"Oh, do you order dog?"
We know why that's racist, but our parents they genuinely 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 of 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...had a few bevvies, down at the pub.
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 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 OK."
And then when they come back, you're like, "Oh, thank God they're OK!"
Sometimes we have regular customers
where 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 just call them by what their order is,
like, "Oh, it's Mr Haddock Man."
You know, he knocks on the window and you go like that, I go,
"Mum, Mr Haddock Man wants a haddock." You know?
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... Yes. ..but it looks like you've got
something similar. Are you serious?
Cos 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 her since.
There'd be times where, cos I was front of the house,
that was probably the time where I can do my homework.
And it was quite nice that there'd be some customers, while they were
waiting, they might peer over the counter and sort of say, "Oh...
"..let's have a look at your homework."
Some of them might sneak in the actual answers themselves.
It's not as special any more,
cos you can just get a Chinese so easily now.
Back then you didn't have a delivery, you rang to collect or you
walked into order right then and there.
And it wasn't till I was about 15/16
I thought, "You know, it would be really good to deliver."
And 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,
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 realise how long those places open for.
12 o'clock to two o'clock for the lunch time,
but then five o'clock is opening time.
My parents, they worked until 11 o'clock
and growing up I'd 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 take
a little stool and I'd sit there.
And essentially I'd 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 the takeaway cos
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's.
Um, and I saw that, just cos 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.
Um...and my mum...
..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 far, so I'm really proud...
..of...
..where they are now.
My mother, she stayed on her feet for, you know, 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 build up what we have now.
You know, we're given the opportunity to go to college,
to go to university.
And, you know, a lot of other people are given head starts
because of their parents' hard work.
My parents came to this country with nothing.
Um, 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
or in the restaurant industry or fish and chips or Chinese restaurant
or takeaway, you know how hard it is to make money. Mm.
And they've done a lot to sacrifice their lives
for us to have a better life.