Sharing food is an important social ritual for Chinese people and can reveal much about the family. This may be witnessed in the food scenes in Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee’s movie Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), which illustrate conflict and reconciliation, providing the viewer with an example of the traditional Chinese family and of its transformation. This chapter assesses these traditions and transformations as representative of modern ethnic Chinese domesticity and society. The protagonist Lao Zhu occupies both traditional nurturing roles, that of paternal and maternal, in that he is not only a father, but has also filled the role of a mother since the children’s mother has passed away. This special relationship, which is manifested at “the dinner table”, provides the impetus and drive for the narrative. As the nominal patriarch, Lao Zhu is undoubtedly the key figure in this film yet Julia Kristeva argues that a father invariably functions in duality: he is not only a symbolic father but is also an imaginary father. In this chapter I will use Kristeva’s theory to analyse the psychological transformation of Lao Zhu, as both a strict father and as a loving mother, a duality that shows a new Chinese family unit, represented by the father–daughter relationship in this film.