Peripheral Visions

When my son and daughter were younger – say, around 7 or 8 – they would every now and then turn to me and ask: "Am I Chinese or American?" I would answer, unequivocally: "You are both." As it happens, we come from a family in which many of their cousins are also "both" and we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where being "both" is downright commonplace, so it's a subject to which we rarely give much thought.