Eileen Chong reflected on her upbringing and its influence on themes in her writing:"To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of the world I grew up in were very much defined by the language of food.

Ancestor worship and veneration centered around food offerings; my grandparents and parents certainly never told me they loved me when I was growing up, but they would ask if I was hungry, and they would do whatever it took to feed me, and they fed me well.

[8][9] From 2019 to 2023, Chong's first book, Burning Rice, was on the New South Wales’ Higher School Certificate syllabus for English Extension .

When Chong's collection Painting Red Orchids was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards the judging panel described it as an "exploration of the contemplative and the personal within subtly shifting contexts of food, love, history and culture" and lauded her "technical confidence and linguistic sophistication" which "contain depths and resonances which repay repeated attention and thought.

"[12] Singaporean-Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng said that Chong's work "offers a poetry of feeling, rendered in luminous detail and language, alive to the sorrows and joys of daily living.