How would you describe the conversations at your family dinner table? When Eric Tung was a kid, there was never much room at dinner for communication with his parents, a pair of fairly conservative Chinese immigrants. So it comes as little surprise that they were shocked when he came out of the closet as an adult or that he wanted to find a way to raise a family. “That was even more outlandish,” Eric says. “They had never seen it. The notion of a gay dad was completely foreign to them.”

This episode of Paternal examines Eric's process of coming out and trying to convince his parents he would one day become a father, his experience of finding an egg donor and a surrogate for in vitro fertilization, and how he carefully explained a unique family structure to his son.

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