"Where are you from?"

I like to ask people “Where are you from?”. Living in the twin cities in the last 12 years, I have learned about lives in Somalia in many of the taxi rides between home and the airport than I’ve ever had from books or internet.

It is an easy question to start a conversation, but for many of us, there is no easy answer.

In China, we used to ask “Where are you originally from?”, “老家在哪?”. There is a consistent residence registration system that is in use today, called Hukou, 户口, which goes back for 2,000 years.

I began to answer the question when I went to Shanghai for college, and the answer became a little complicated already. My family originally came from Haimen, 海门, a place I had never been to and could tell very little about. By then, my family had moved from the northeast part of China to Wuhu, 芜湖, in Anhui province. In China, one of the first reasons for asking the question is to find out if you speak the same dialect. I would earnestly put on a little twist of the northeast dialect, whenever encounter someone from the three provinces of Northeast China.

I love the answers I heard when we lived in Antwerp Belgium for half a year. One of the colleagues from the University Hospital told me that he had a big move when he got married. He had to move from the north of the city to the south of the city to be close to his wife’s family. So he has a very specific answer, “I am from South of Antwerp”.

My answer has been getting more hopeless as we move around in the US over the years. Sometimes when I was being asked the question, I can also tell the question includes “Where are you originally from?”, which is not to find out my dialect. I would go through the places I have lived in China. “Shanghai” usually is the satisfactory answer, “Yes, my sister was there last year”, although I have lost most of my dialect from Shanghai.

I am making up my mind though, right now, “I am from Minneapolis”. This is home for the longest so far in my life. We are having the first big snow of the year, the city is beautiful.