Most days, our father’s need to assimilate overwhelmed his desire to teach us Chinese. The list of words he taught us reads like a koan, chronicling the life of a family, that, in lieu of speaking to each other, eats together.

It was our parents’ idiosyncratic union—riddled with power differentials, cultural, temperamental, and linguistic misunderstandings, set in a world in which, only one year prior, such a marriage would have been illegal—that made us.