I'm just going to take a short detour from the standard post to recount a conversation Allison and I had the other day. We were talking about our own study abroad experiences, trying to recount some of the questions we ourselves had been asked by the citizens of our respective host countries, but we didn't get very far past "Where are you from?" We didn't get very far because we started considering the various ways we answered this question. For Allison and I, the context in which the conversation occurred largely determined how we actually answered the question. Allison recalled that when she first got to Scotland, she had an explanation as to how she went to school in DC but was actually raised in the midwest; but she later abandoned this explanation and simply told people she was from DC. (The exception being when she was on the continent where she told people she was from Edinburgh because EU students could get discounts at a lot of places.) I did a similar thing as Allison, where I started with a long explanation about where I was from, but eventually telling most people that I was from "near Boston", figuring some people in New Zealand had at least heard of Boston. Occasionally, when we were travelling about the country, I would also tell people I was from the town where my university was located (although I suspect my accent contradicted that statement a little bit).
I found it most interesting that while I said I was from the place where I had grown up, Allison chose to tell people she was from the place where she went to school. Part of this had to do with the fact that most people in Scotland did not seem to be familiar with much of U.S. geography beyond the coasts, so it was difficult for her to explain exactly where her home was. Both of us, however, were prone to altering exactly where "we were from" when the situation called for it.
While people may ask questions to learn about and understand the person they are questioning, the way in which we choose to answer those questions allows us to construct our own identities. Thus our identity may change ever so slightly in the eyes of others in the ways we answer such seemingly basic questions as "Where are you from?"
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So I hope this gets read, but I thought posting here would be less confusing than a new post. Gina mentioned that she also has the added dimension of racial identity, which people sometimes mean when they ask "Where are you from?" (Gina is Indian). Gina adds "and I always seem to mistake which one they mean!"
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