A string of mumbled words whooshes out of my dad’s mouth as he struggles to form a coherent sentence. Questions fly out of the cashier’s mouth and launch themselves at my dad while he tries to process her words: Would he like a plastic bag for 10 cents? A Safeway Club card? What about an eco-friendly reusable tote for $2? Meanwhile, my freshman self stands beside him staring at the ground, flinching each time he stumbles over his words.

Behind closed doors, I am my dad’s personal English coach. Carefully pronouncing vowels and enunciating consonants, I drill different English phrases into his mind regularly while insisting that he copy my words. From car rides to the dinner table to the line for grocery shopping, I am there next to him, anxiously reciting unmastered words to cleanse the heavy Taiwanese accent from his speech.

Yet, as soon as we leave the security of those closed doors, a façade of cold apathy blankets my supposed supportiveness. When “sour cheese” is ordered instead of “sour cream,” I grimace in embarrassment and shuffle to the side, attempting to avoid being associated with him. Each time he butchers Stephen Curry’s name as “Steven Curry,” I groan in shame as he ruins his credibility of being a true Warriors fan.

“Why does it matter so much to you?” he would ask me as I’d nitpick his mispronunciation of Stephen.

“I’m trying to help you improve your English,” I’d retort, but we both knew that was an excuse. My meticulous instruction wasn’t an extension of goodwill. It was just a product of my shame at his Asian accent — I worried that each blundered word projects a bad image on our family.

That same freshman year, I remember going to get lunch with my older brother and my dad at a sandwich shop. As my dad struggled through his order, I glanced at my brother and snickered, attempting to relieve my embarrassment by teaming up with him against my dad. Instead, my brother glared at me for my rudeness and pushed me aside to help my dad order.

My initial reaction was to lash out in annoyance. Wasn’t this the guy who always mocked my dad’s accent at home? When “downtown” somehow became “dawntawn” or when “lizard” became “lillard,” my brother would roll over in laughter, mimicking the broken words that fell from my dad’s lips.

Yet as I soon realized, there was a clear difference in the way we treated Dad’s accent. While my brother’s mockery was done out of good-natured fun in the privacy of our home, my shame was rooted in my insecurity of identity. In our home, where there is a clear divide between two different cultures, I struggled to properly adopt American culture without the stain of Taiwanese mannerisms. Because my dad could not sew together his words fluently, I rejected him as an American.

But for someone who pays American taxes, follows American politics and lives on American soil, my dad is just as American as anyone born in this country.

So what if his words don’t flow as smoothly as a native speaker? Those words, however broken, represent the hours of hard work dedicated to learning English in order to secure an education for himself in America. They represent the daily frustrations of a peer or professor misunderstanding his words. Those slips in pronunciation, as I have realized, cannot determine how American my dad is.

Now three years older, I feel no shame in being out in public with my dad. When his daily errands require interaction with others, I have taken it upon myself to help him translate as much as possible.

For most children of immigrants, it’s almost inevitable that our two different cultures will clash, but I have learned to take pride in the Taiwanese culture that my family so fiercely values.