One Sunday, my family had gathered at my parents’ house to feast upon Mom’s wonderful cooking. During the normal dinner chatter, I noticed that my father was slurring (说话含混) his words. No one mentioned this during dinner, but I felt compelled to discuss it with my mother afterward.

We decided that there was something seriously wrong and that Dad needed to see the doctor.

Mom phoned me two days later. The doctor found a brain tumor (肿瘤). It’s too large at this point to operate. Maybe they can do something then, but the odds are long.

Even with the treatment, my father’s condition worsened, and the doctor finally informed us that this condition was terminal. During one of his stays in the hospital, we brought our baby daughter Chelsey with us when we visited him. By this time he had great difficulty speaking. I finally figured out that he wanted Chelsey to sit on his stomach so he could make faces at her.

Watching the two of them together, I realized I was living an experience that would stay with me forever. Though grateful for the times they could share, I couldn’t shake the feeling of a clock ticking in the background.

On the visit to my parents’ home during what we all know was my father’s last days, my mother took Chelsey from my arms and announced, “Your father would like to see you alone for a minute. ”

I entered the bedroom where my father lay on a rented hospital bed. He appeared even weaker than the day before.

“How are you feeling, Dad?” I asked. “Can I do anything for you?”

He tried to speak, but he couldn’t make out a word.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t understand you,” I said.

With great difficulty he said, “I love you.”

We don’t learn courage from heroes on the evening news. We learn true courage from watching ordinary people rise above hopeless situations. In many ways my father was a strict, uncommunicative man. He found it difficult to show emotion. The bravest thing I ever saw him do was overcome that barrier to open his heart to his son and family at the end of his life.

The relationship between Jeffrey Pang and his son, Kevin Pang, was like hot-and-sour soup. It boiled over easily. The Pangs, who moved to the United States in 1988, wanted their son and daughter to know Chinese culture. As a video game-playing American teen, Kevin wasn’t interested.

But when Kevin became a food writer for the Chicago Tribune, he realized he had a valuable resource: his cook-laving dad. “My father and I shared, for the first time, a common interest. I would call to ask about recipes and cooking techniques. He would school me on the world of Chinese food,” Kevin writes in the introduction to the cookbook he has just published.

When it comes to cooking Chinese food, he points out that there is no one definition of Chinese food. “Chinese cooking is not hidebound. For example, consider baked pork chop rice, popularized in Hong Kong. It is a pork chop with egg-fried rice. And then you top it with this thick tomato sauce,” explains Kevin. “And then you top that with some cheese. It’s a very interesting combined dish that has some Western British influences, and it’s altogether very Chinese as well.”

By the time Kevin joined America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) staff in 2020 as its editorial director for digital content, his dad had become an Internet celebrity demonstrating the family’s recipes. Kevin recognized an opportunity not only to share his own family’s food stories but also to apply the ATK method of breaking down recipes into simple steps for the home cook.

“I think this cookbook can teach fathers and sons how to connect, how to find a common interest and improve their relationship, ” Kevin says. That feeling has found an enthusiastic fan base, generating nearly 3 million views, for their online cooking series “Hunger Pangs”, where viewers speak highly of their father-son bond as much as they do of their attractive dishes. Today the Pangs’ relationship is rarely sour or hot.

One out of many important things for the whole family to do is to have dinner together. Researchers began reporting the benefits of family dinner about a decade ago, focusing mainly on how it affects children. Studies show that those families who eat dinner at least 3 or 4 times a week together, benefit in many ways.

Eating together helps families achieve open communication and build stronger and healthier relationships. Children have better grades at school and are better adjusted as teens and adults, and the entire family enjoys healthier nutrition. For many families, eating dinner together proves to be a good and effective way to reduce the risk of youth rates of addiction, and helps to nurture healthier children. It is also a great time to share the events of the day, discuss news and ideas and just be together and enjoy each other’s company.

During dinner time parents have better opportunity to show that they are the prior to their children. Sitting at the same table and sharing meals is where and when parents can find out more about their children’s school performance, daily activities and attitudes toward life. When parents have all this information they can better direct their kids toward positive things in life. They also have better chance to reduce the possibility that children will get involved with alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs.

However, family researchers say that the benefits of family dinner by no means can be considered as automatic. Parents can sit down to dinner with their kids every day and achieve nothing. Family dinner may not benefit if there is too much arguing going on, if there is no meaningful conversation or, what is even worse, if there is just plain silence during gathering.