And I, who couldn’t cry, once again found them both to be far more convincing children of my father than I had ever been. And yet, in our family, we had never wanted to admit this unlikelihood, we always batted away what we considered to be the banal and prurient curiosity of strangers—“But won’t she grow up confused?” “How will she choose between your cultures?”—to the point that sometimes I felt the whole purpose of my childhood was to demonstrate to the less enlightened that I was not confused and had no trouble choosing. “Life is confusing!”—my mother’s imperious rebuff. But isn’t there
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