Where are you from? August 3, 2007

I was at a bar on 82nd and Amsterdam ordering a drink when a white-haired man asked me, “Where are you from?”  For a few seconds I was confused.  Yeah, where am I from really?  I was going to tell him New York, but I’d lived in New Jersey for a bit before I moved to Atlanta.  I go to school in Michigan, and I went to high school in Rochester, NY.  Before all that moving happened, I lived in Taipei, Taiwan.  Finally, I managed to squeeze out, “Georgia.”  He stared at me for a second, processing my answer.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s rare an Asian girl is from Georgia, or it’s because he was expecting me to say China.  Anyway, after he complimented on my good looks, I politely thanked him and told him bye.  Obviously if I’m that good looking, I have the choice of not talking him.

Personally, I’m fine with moving around and not having a place I can say where I’m from.  For now, home is wherever my dad is, somewhere I can go to on important holidays.  It’s not necessarily my obsession with finding a home, but rather other people’s.  Whatever I say, someone’s bound to say, “No, you’re not from there, you’re really from…”  Hey, who the heck are you to tell me where I’m from?

Which leads me to wonder why people have such a strong obsession with “roots.”  I think I used to be obsessed with it, too.  I never considered myself a real Taiwanese, because my dad’s side’s family is from mainland, and growing up in a patrimonial society, I was from where my dad’s dad was from, Hunan Province, China.  But obviously that was refuted when I moved to the States and met some “real” Chinese people, who told me I was really Taiwanese.  And you know the rest of the story: between graduating from high school and now, my family and myself have lived in five places total, and I’m not from anywhere, according to everyone.  A lot of times I don’t feel I belong anywhere, and if I want to simplify my question, people are obsessed with belonging.  It’s a basic human emotion, and we are out to fulfill it.

Before I left New York, or New Jersey, whatever you want to say, I’d always claimed myself as an East Coaster during school in Michigan.  But during the National Asian American Student Conference board transition retreat, I found myself waving the Midwest flag really hard, along with a little South flag (not confederacy, though), and afterwards I laughed at myself because I’d never admitted I was a Midwest girl until that retreat.  Of course, real Midwesterners won’t think I’m from the Midwest, and real Southerners probably think I’m a Yankee and should go back to Yankeesland up there anyway.  Or they’ll tell me to go back to China, and that’ll just get more complicated.