🥢 Have You Eaten Yet?
A cultural study on food, love, and intergenerational care in Chinese immigrant families
📝 Context
For this university studio, we explored how food functions as a love language in Chinese immigrant families—revealing how emotional care, cultural identity, and resilience are passed down through shared meals and silent gestures.
🤝 Role
User Researcher & Project Manager
⌛️ Timeline
6 weeks (April–May 2024)
👯♀️ Team
Vivian Truong + 2 Team Members
🏆 Achievements
Highest Mark in Final Assignment
🔄 Our Process at a Glance
We designed a research process that would let us explore both the depth of individual stories and the breadth of community perspectives. Each step built upon the last, helping us move from initial assumptions to rich, layered insights.
🧭 Setting the Foundation
We began with desktop research into cross-cultural family dynamics, emotional expression, and non-verbal care in Chinese culture. Before asking others about their experiences, we wanted to understand the systems, histories, and traditions that shape how care is communicated across generations.
Our initial literature review included:
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Studies on filial piety and emotional suppression in Chinese households
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Cultural psychology texts on immigrant identity
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Articles on food as communication and memory
From this, we discovered that in many Chinese-Australian families, meals often become the “stage” for emotional expression—especially in place of verbal affection. This shaped our hypothesis:
Food rituals may be emotionally expressive, but often misunderstood across generations.
We needed methods that could uncover both surface-level habits and deeper emotional meaning—so we built our research plan to explore both the breadth of community expression and the depth of personal experience.
Starting with a strong foundation helped us ask sharper questions in the field. It reminded me that meaningful research starts long before the first interview—it starts with listening, even to what's already been written.
🎤 Semi-Structured Interviews
We interviewed 9 participants aged 10–60 across two generations. This method allowed us to stay consistent while holding space for emotional storytelling.
Why this method?
Food is intimate. Talking about it often reveals more than people intend—memories, grief, pride. A rigid structure would’ve limited this. So we used flexible guides based on reciprocal determinism, allowing stories to flow while capturing behavioural, personal, and cultural cues.
“She never said ‘I love you,’ but when I was sick, she’d just bring me soup. That’s her way.”
-Interview Participant
“My dad used to scold me at the dinner table, but he’d always serve me first.”
-Interview Participant
I learned that silence isn’t a gap—it’s part of the data. Especially in immigrant families, what’s not said matters just as much as what is.
🏮 Pop-Up Engagement: Flavours of the Past
To include more community voices, we designed and ran a participatory installation in Chatswood and Burwood—suburbs chosen for their Chinese-Australian cultural density.
We set up a public memory wall, with prompts like:
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What dish reminds you of home?
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How do you show love through food?
🧑🧑🧒🧒
What’s something you wish your family understood?
40+ strangers contributed sticky notes, drawings, and reflections in English, Chinese, or both.
Why this method?
Not everyone joins formal interviews. This public storytelling approach allowed for emotional spontaneity, low-barrier access, and rich observational insight (e.g. who lingered, who returned, who brought family back later).
“My grandma never hugged me. But she made the best steamed fish. That was her hug.”
-Participant response on sticky note
Designing for participation, not just data collection, changed how I see research. People are not subjects—they're collaborators when given the right tools and space.
🔁 Follow-Up Interviews
We reconnected with 17 participants who left meaningful notes at the installation. These 1:1 conversations helped uncover the emotional depth behind their brief responses.
We asked:
“What made you choose that dish?”
“What memories does it hold?”
“Do you see food as something you give or something you receive?”
These sessions helped us discover new layers—what began as a drawing or one-liner often revealed deeper emotional histories.
“I drew that soup because that’s the only time we sat at the same table without arguing."
-Follow up Interview Participant
Why this method?
We wanted to triangulate insights from interviews, public notes, and follow-ups—capturing both intention and emotion. It helped validate themes and challenged our assumptions.
Following up helped me realise that research is iterative. You rarely get the full story the first time—it takes care, trust, and time.
🧵 Thematic Analysis
After collecting 50+ narrative fragments across interviews and community engagement, we chose to use inductive thematic analysis to synthesize the data. This approach aligned with our research aims:
Uncover food-related generational trauma in Chinese immigrant families, and how love is expressed across generations through food.
Why thematic analysis?
Thematic analysis helped us identify emotional patterns without forcing predefined assumptions—critical for a topic as intimate and layered as intergenerational care and trauma. Our stories spanned languages, generations, and contexts, and we needed a method that could hold space for complexity.
We followed a collaborative process:
Step 1: Initial Coding
Each team member coded interviews individually, highlighting meaningful phrases like "She cuts fruit for me every day" or "I want to be a different parent than mine were."
These became our first codes.
Step 2: Sub-themes
We then grouped codes by emotional proximity—clustering them under early sub-themes like “food as control,” “silent affection,” and “cultural guilt.”
Step 3: Defining themes
Finally, we refined and reframed sub-themes into broader, research-aligned themes like:
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Meals as Emotional Anchors
Eating together—whether in silence or celebration—was deeply tied to feelings of being cared for. One participant said: “She didn’t say much, but she always made my favourite soup when I looked tired.”
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Food as Cultural Identity
Recipes were described as “heirlooms,” passed down across generations. They carried both history and hope. “When I cook what my parents taught me, I feel like I’m speaking their language.”
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Tensions of Love & Expectation
Not all associations were positive. Some participants described food as an obligation or pressure point tied to body image or control. 📸 Add: A visual of your thematic map or selected quotes in sticky note format
Thematic analysis reminded me that not every quote fits neatly into a theme—and that’s okay. It taught me how to let meaning emerge organically, and to prioritise empathy over rigidity in the way we interpret human experience.
👩🔬 My Role
As one of the core researchers on this project, I contributed to both planning and executing our research, particularly around synthesis, community engagement, and narrative framing. My contributions included:
Assisted in conducting interviews and participated in several follow-ups
Led thematic coding and supported collaborative affinity mapping
Contributed to literature review and desktop research to shape our problem framing
Designed the tone and structure of our pop-up engagement
Managed synthesis documentation and storytelling outputs for final deliverables
🔍 Dig into the details
I’ve attached more details about the project (only sharing what I’m allowed to showcase!).
💡 Reflections
This project taught me how to sit with ambiguity, code for emotion, and translate quiet stories into powerful insights. I learned that researching with empathy isn’t just about asking thoughtful questions—it’s about how you listen, what you notice, and what you choose to honour in the telling. We weren’t just collecting stories. We were holding space for people to feel seen.
“Food speaks in ways our parents sometimes can’t.”
Working across generations, languages, and cultures taught me that meaning is often subtle—and that silence, hesitation, and ritual can say just as much as spoken words. It shaped the way I now approach research: as an act of care, not just discovery.
