Talking when you eat is bad for you, and other Chinese beliefs

“What did your family talk about at the dinner table?”
Snug under the Tuscan sun, at a writing retreat on a permaculture farm outside Florence, I was ready to mine my fondest food memories. For a moment, scenes from films and television flashed across my mind: a montage of vivid dinner conversations and emotional check-ins, stitched together from various coming-of-age stories.
The only problem was that I could not claim any of those vignettes as my own. I squinted and dug deeper, into countless...