A recent trip to my homeland – a cold, wet but welcoming England – brought me back to a part of my life I had long left behind: takeaway living.

My boyfriend and I, unwilling to squeeze into my parents’ already cramped home or pay for a hotel, accepted an offer from my uncle and aunt to stay in the rooms above their popular Chinese takeaway.

Pulling up to the front of the store with our suitcases felt like I had travelled back to my teenage years. Inside, when the phone rang, my hand reflexively reached out to pick it up to take down a customer’s order.

Poking about the kitchen the next morning revealed metal pots that I remembered from yesteryear, a worn wooden chest that was probably as old as me, and the same warming cabinet I used to store the evening’s portions of fried rice in when I would help out. It was odd, and oddly comforting, to realise certain things never changed.

Of course, some things have, like my perspective on just exactly what my grandparents sacrificed for their children – and, by extension, me – by emigrating from Hong Kong in the 1970s and setting up shop in a completely foreign country.

I am sure that, for the most part, it must have felt like thankless work for my grandparents who, until their deaths, knew little English. They left behind everything they knew, their friends and family, and a feeling of belonging for the notion of a better future. They toiled away, first in Scotland and then in northern England.