No, but where are you REALLY from?

Meeting new people is great, but there are a few questions that you generally ask someone when you first meet them: what’s your name? What do you do? Where are you from? Etc.

(Wait, now that I think about it, do white people even get asked where they’re from? I genuinely don’t know.)

Personally, I hate being asked where I’m from because I don’t feel attached or connected with one place or one culture or one ethnicity. As a child I had always wished I was white so nobody would second guess where I was from. My ethnicity or if you really wanted to say “race” is Arab. I lived in New Zealand for the first 10 years of my life (however, I was not born here), and then I moved to the Middle East and lived there until I finished school and then came back to Auckland for university.

While I was living overseas I was raised very ‘westernised’, most of the people who I was surrounded by were international students (by that I mean white) and had a similar upbringing to mine and this meant that even though I didn’t grow up in the “western world” I still grew up in a western way. Therefore, my ideals, values and way of seeing the world are very Eurocentric, as it would be for anyone here in New Zealand and of course this is influenced by mass media and what I’m exposed to online as well as my daily life.

The only issue for me is that I don’t look the part, I have brown skin and dark hair and different features. So really, I’m not allowed to identify with a more westernised cultural or ethic group. In our lecture on whiteness, it was mentioned that only white people get the privilege of being white, and others get the names such as “Oreo” or “banana” which is usually a negative construct of that person. For me, since most of my friends throughout my entire life have been white, I’ve always been a mould of almost white but never quite reaching it. I’ve grown accustomed to phrases like “you’re basically white anyway”, “you’re not like THOSE types of Arabs” “yeah, but you’re different, you’re more like us”. These discourses and use of language, even while trying to include me as part of them, still creates a separation, those who are white and those who are others – Us vs Them. This makes extremely difficult for people such as myself to fit themselves into a category as we no longer belong to our “ethnic race” (i.e. the one we look like) because our cultural and moral beliefs have differed) however, we will not be accepted into another ethnicity due to how we look. ‘Moreover, I still have elements of my parents cultural and religious practices ingrained into my lifestyle which further differs me for my peers, which again, does not allow me to fit neatly into either box.

So, back to the question at hand: where am I from? I don’t relate to where my genes come from, I have no attachments to it and I don’t identify with it, so I don’t like to claim that’s where I’m from. Yet, when people ask where I’m from that’s where they want me to say. Because I didn’t grow up through my prime years in New Zealand I don’t necessarily say I’m from here. However, I’m a New Zealand Citizen, I’ve spent many years of my life here, worked here, studied here, voted here and been apart of the culture here so if I wanted to, I should be able to claim a link to this country if I chose to. Yet, when asked, and give the answer “I’m from Auckland” I always get back the “No, but where are you REALLY from?”.

What does being from somewhere mean? In a world that has become so globalised and so multicultural it really shouldn’t be at a point where someone who looks Asian says they’re from Auckland but then has to go back and tell them that their family is actually Korean.