So when I became a food writer, my father and I shared, for the first time, a mutual interest. I would call to ask about recipes and cooking techniques. He would school me on the world of Cantonese cuisine. The first time he visited me in Chicago, I took him to a dim sum restaurant for brunch, and as we ate shrimp dumplings and barbecued pork buns, he explained — gesticulating with his arms like a conductor — how the shiu mai’s wrapper should caress its filling “like a dress on a woman, like petals of a flower, like prongs on a diamond ring.” I had never heard him speak with such enthusiasm or eloquence. My father never taught me to swim, or to ride a bike, but he did teach me how to tell a good dim sum restaurant from a great one.

Food became something I could use to engage him and repair our relationship. When we talked on the phone about how to wrap Shanghai water dumplings or braise dong po rou pork belly, 30 minutes would fly by. Then, when the subject turned to anything else: “How’s the weather? Plans this weekend? O.K., goodbye.”

It’s not doing “Carpool Karaoke” numbers or landing guest appearances by Michelle Obama, but the relative success of my dad’s cooking videos has been, for me, almost unbelievable. Most people would kill to have these viewer metrics. The videos are earnest and adorably cheese-ball, bearing the production tropes of ’80s VHS: There are spinning wipe effects, gratuitous zooms, saccharine background music.

His most-watched recipe, with nearly a quarter-million views, is for Chinkiang-style pork ribs. I remember eating these when I was growing up. He would use a cleaver to chop spare ribs into two-bite cubes, wok-fry them, then sauce them with a viscous glaze of Chinese black vinegar. The result was fatty and sticky and crisp, and I would slurp the meat clean off the bone in one motion. Watching through nearly two dozen more videos, I realized every single dish had been served in my childhood home. Macau-style Portuguese coconut chicken. Pan-fried turnip cake. Sweet-and-sour pork. This time, the wave of nostalgia washed over me: I was 12 again, sitting at the kitchen table, my family’s mouths too preoccupied to squabble.

My dad makes enough in each month’s ad revenues to take my mom out for a nice lunch. Making the clips is a lot of work. The two of them test each recipe a half-dozen times before committing it to film. Dad is behind the camera and editing the footage; it’s usually my mom’s hands demonstrating. They don’t speak in the videos. They say they’re embarrassed by their spoken English and feel more comfortable using onscreen text, in Chinese and English, for instruction. Writing and translating this adds several more hours of work.

“Why?” I asked during one of our weekly phone conversations. “Do you want a show on the Food Network or something?”

“You really want to know?” my dad asked in Chinese. “Your mom’s great-grandmother used to cook amazing Shanghainese food for her. She would dream about it. But when your mom was finally old enough to ask for the recipes, her great-grandmother had already developed dementia. She couldn’t even remember cooking those dishes. The only thing your mom had left was the memory of her taste. We’re afraid that if you wanted to eat your childhood dishes, and one day we’re both no longer around, you wouldn’t know how to cook it.”