This study examines features of communication in American households where Chinese is used as a heritage language against the backdrop of global migration and technological advancement. It aims to elucidate how meaning emerges and evolves through repeated and varied performance by multiple participants over time, through mundane and iterative practices of everyday conversation. It focuses on how child and adult speakers in this context appropriate each other's vocabularies and voices, mimic and modify each other's utterances, and collaboratively construct provisional meanings as they jointly navigate and negotiate their worlds and complement each other's language skills and cultural knowledge.