Where Are You From?

Upon meeting a stranger, “Where are you from?” is perhaps the most ubiquitous question in any culture of the world.

Few are prepared to hear my answer, which has varied over my 63 years, and ranged from “Australia” to “I’m a Bendjesserit” to “Nowhere” to “Everywhere” to “I’m a diplomat brat” to “It’s complicated” to “I’m an eternal Foreigner” to my current: “I’m a Transnational”. No matter what my short answer may be, I always have to explain myself further, unless the person asking the question was also brought up in more than three cultures as a child. In case you are wondering, Bendjesserit is a word my sister made up to describe children like us, who were raised in many countries. When we were growing up, there were not many of us.

About meeting other Trans-nationally brought-up people, suffice to say this for now: I can often spot another Transnational from ten feet away before they have even opened their mouth.

As for the majority of fixed-cultured people’s reactions to my answer, they fall into a few categories.

Bandwagon Wannabies

One of the most common reactions I get from fixed-cultured people is what I call “wanting to jump on my band-wagon”. “Oh” they say, “I’m like that too!”. This is friendly but also completely misses the point. It is friendly in that they obviously want to identify with me, but annoying in that they are white-washing my self-identification and negating my difference. I am exotic, and they want to be exotic too, but if they have been raised in one country, they are not.

Often the people who want to jump on my bandwagon have been brought up transiently, moving around a lot, but within the same country, and do indeed have points of similarity — they went to lots of schools, and lost their childhood friends and connections again and again, and had to learn how to fit in as a newcomer repeatedly. But they only have one cultural reference. Even if they have two cultural references, that is not so strange, as we all have two parents and people often marry someone from a different culture. Even if they have three cultural references, i.e. they have immigrant parents from two different cultures but were raised in a third one, that is not so strange either. They may well have had a peripatetic childhood, but they are not Transnationals.

Then you get bandwagon jumpers who travelled the world as adults, and seem to believe that that qualifies them as a Transnational and a “Citizen of the World”. It may qualify them as amateur anthropologists, but that is not the same thing as being a child forced to uproot again and again, while willy-nilly learning what the changing world around them is.

It is not the particulars of each culture we have been raised in that matter; it is the fact that many different cultural values got woven inextricably and invisibly into us as a child. Children are, by definition, still forming, and rely a lot on body-language, subtle visual clues and attitudes of both adults and children around them, as well as the language and music and sights in the streets and places they go, in order to “read”, make sense of, and fit into, the world.

“YOU LUCKY PRIVILEGED SO-AND-SO!” PROJECTIONISTS

Another typical reaction of settled people is along the lines of “You privileged brat”. I am privileged, and grateful, but 99% of projectionists are also privileged, and rather than being grateful for it, they are ignorant of the many luxuries they take for granted, and are jealous of me. Many adults have an ambition or life wish to “travel the world”, and project that adult wish onto the fact of me. I can say with authority that no child has the ambition or wish to be uprooted constantly, losing every single person in their life except their immediate family, and “travel the world”. Children by definition do not get to make such life choices. They do what they’re told and go where they’re taken.

YOGHURT (AN ASIDE)

As a child, not only was I raised in six countries, but I had babysitters, teachers, neighbours and friends from innumerable countries all over the world, and though I may remember their specific nationalities, none of them were foreign to me. Or at least, none were more foreign than any other. For us Transnationals, that is a cultural marker, a characteristic that does not end with childhood. It is part of our very being, and means that while we are eternally outsiders we also are naturally adept at fitting in. Accepting cultural differences and standards is a trait of Transnationals, even as adults. That is often met with distrust by fixed-culture people.

One example of this fitting in manifests in me through my accent. My accent changes, involuntarily, to that of the people around me. It often makes settled people mistrust me. Or I may be misbelieved that I do not share childhood experiences that they assume I must. Mistrust is one of the hardest attitudes to bear, and is the burden of any Transnational. I try to explain my multi-cultural upbringing, and try to explain my shifting accent, often by making a comparison to milk and yogurt: you need a specific culture and specific conditions for yogurt to set; I am still milk. I will ever be milk.

REDUCTIONISTS

Yet another category of fixed-culture people are the reductionists, who point blank deny my self-identification and dismiss me with one sentence that is not so much a question as a smug statement of superiority, and is comparable to calling me an out-and-out liar: “Well where were you born, you can only be born in one place!” ….Sigh.

NEED TO KNOW

I want to go back to my original statement about meeting a new person, and that the question “where are you from?” is the most ubiquitous question world-wide. And it is world-wide. Adults need to fit other people into an “Origins Box.” Why do you think that is? Does it not also mean that people have a universal need to fit into such a conventional Origins box themselves? Are you a Transnational yourself, and do you feel validated, supported or vindicated by my article here?

I will end with my favourite anecdote about a childhood friend of mine, who, upon being asked where they were from, replied stoutly: “From a taxi with my mother.”