This was certainly the case for another of my sons. “From the first day of school,” he told me, “I felt different from my classmates.” He described this as a “slightly bad feeling” and said he’d been bullied, something he’d never told me before. For him, difference was not an advantage, it was a burden, and his looks, which are somewhat exotic, were “a card you could play but don’t really want to.” He, too, acknowledged that this exoticism could be an asset, but it was not one he had ever wanted and the price he’d had to pay for it was steep.

My third son had an entirely different take. By the time he was in middle school, he told me, he had recognized that being unusual gave him a social advantage. “I knew it was something that was cool,” he said. He told me that he got a kick out of the fact that people couldn’t pronounce his surname (something that caused his brother endless misery) and observed that the social cred effect had only increased with age.

Despite having grown up in the same family and sharing almost everything in their lives, my sons had very different accounts of what growing up hapa had been like.

At least part of the reason is that they themselves have different strengths and weaknesses, different instincts, different tastes. One’s shyness is a disadvantage in this context, another’s gregariousness is a plus. Birth order also plays a role; it’s harder to be first than third. But of my three sons, only one had enjoyed the unadulterated pleasure at being “difficult to place” that I had so confidently envisioned for them.

I’m kind of amazed at how wrong I got this. I had loved being out of my element, but I had been a grown-up. I had chosen the experience of estrangement, I had traveled on my own to the far side of the world. They, on the other hand, had been children. They had never had any choice in the matter; being different was something that had been foisted upon them.

It’s such an obvious distinction that I wonder now how I failed to see it. Perhaps the answer lies in the way we, as parents, project ourselves onto our children. We forget that they are not us and that their experiences are not ours and that the world they inhabit is different from the one in which we grew up.

They will, however, have other experiences, many of which will have to do with the way the world is changing around them. Hapa kids belong to one of the fastest growing segments of the American population. The percentage of people with mixed ancestry, now estimated at about 7 percent of the population, is expected to triple in the next 30 years.