"What's your background?"
Truly a loaded question. I struggled at first to ask this to my coworkers because, as would be expected in the largest city of Canada, nearly everyone said,"I'm Canadian!" and "I don't identify with any other culture!".
"But what are the fragments that make up your background?"
Even if they ended up answering that their parents and grandparents were born or identified as Canadian, eventually they would concede, "Well, my great-grandparents were born elsewhere..." , or, "My mother can speak another language, even though I can't...". Bam: gold mine.
I'm not concerned with if you can speak the language of your grandparents or if you can make that super-traditional dish; I just want to know what remains of those cultural ties and the stories that arose from them.