Evolving Self
“Where are you from?” is one of the simplest questions we ask when we meet someone new.
Where are you from?
For much of my life, I thought I knew how to answer to this question. What I eventually realized was that my answer kept changing.
When I was very young, my parents were transferred for work, and our family moved to another part of Cameroon. People would sometimes ask where we came from. I knew there was an answer. My parents knew it. The adults asking apparently expected me to know it too. But I had been so young when we moved that I could barely remember the place they wanted me to name.
The town where we lived was the place I knew. It was where I went to elementary school, where I had friends, and where my childhood memories were forming. Yet when someone asked where I was from, familiarity was apparently not what the question was measuring. There was somewhere before this place, and that earlier place seemed to have a claim on me even though I could hardly remember it.
I simply learned that where you lived and where you were “from” could be different places.
Years later, I left for university in another region. When people there asked where I came from, I named the town where I had grown up. This time, the answer seemed obvious. The place that had once been insufficient as an answer had become, through my departure from it, where I was from.
Then I moved for my first job, and the city where I had gone to university sometimes became my answer. The pattern continued when I moved to the United States and settled first in Virginia. There, the geographical scale of the question expanded. When someone asked where I was from, I said Cameroon.
Among Cameroonians, however, Cameroon was hardly an answer. Where in Cameroon? What region? What ethnic community? Later, I moved from Virginia to West Virginia. If someone asked where I had come from, Virginia seemed perfectly accurate.
“No, where are you originally from?” Cameroon, I said.
Years later, I moved from West Virginia to Maryland for work. Once again came the familiar question. “Where are you from?” West Virginia, I would say. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.
“No, originally.”
After a lifetime of answering the same question, I began to wonder whether it had ever been only one question at all.
“Where are you from?” can mean different things.
Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Where did you live before coming here? What is your nationality? Where does your family come from? What community do you belong to? Depending on who is asking, it might even be a way of asking about language, ethnicity, ancestry, or culture without naming any of them directly.
These questions can produce different answers from the same person, yet ordinary conversation compresses them into the same five words. That works reasonably well when a person’s biography fits the assumption embedded in the question: birthplace, childhood, residence, family history, and belonging all point in roughly the same geographical direction.
Mobility disrupts that neat correspondence.
At university, the town where I had grown up was where I was from. In Virginia, Cameroon conveyed information that the name of a city in Cameroon would not. Among Cameroonians, however, saying Cameroon conveyed almost nothing. The facts of my life had not changed. The context had.
In economics, we are accustomed to thinking about reference points. The meaning of an outcome can depend partly on the baseline against which it is evaluated. Something similar happens with place.
“From” is not always a fixed biographical coordinate. Sometimes it is relational information. Maryland makes West Virginia relevant. West Virginia once made Virginia relevant. The United States makes Cameroon relevant. Within Cameroon, a region, town, language, or ethnic community may become relevant.
The answer changes because the reference point changes. Mobility does something even more interesting. A place that begins as a destination can eventually become an origin.
The town where I grew up in Cameroon was once somewhere my parents moved us to. When I left for university, it became somewhere I was from. Virginia was once my destination after Cameroon. After I moved to West Virginia, Virginia became where I had come from. Now that I live in Maryland, West Virginia can be where I am from.
Yesterday’s destination becomes today’s point of departure. We often describe migration as movement from A to B. But lives lived across places rarely remain that clean. B can become the starting point for C, and C for D. Perhaps that is why “Where are you from?” becomes harder to answer the more a person has moved.
The question asks for a point. A life may be a trajectory.
Also read: The Job I Almost Walked Away From
Living somewhere is not merely a matter of coordinates.
Researchers studying place attachment have examined the bonds people form with places through memory, relationships, experience, identity, and meaning. One insight is particularly relevant to people who move: attachment does not have to begin at birth, nor must one attachment disappear before another can develop.
Why should the place where someone happened to be born necessarily have a greater claim on belonging than a place where that person spent years becoming an adult, building relationships, studying, working, struggling, succeeding, or simply living?
Birth is an event. Belonging is a relationship. A birthplace can be recorded on a certificate. Belonging cannot.
It develops through people we know, routines we establish, roads we no longer need directions to navigate, institutions that shape us, work we do, memories we accumulate, and ordinary days repeated often enough that a place becomes woven into our lives.
This does not mean every place we live becomes home. Some remain addresses. Some represent particular chapters. Others become part of who we are becoming. Movement can therefore leave us with an accumulated geography: places with different claims, memories, and meanings, none necessarily performing the same role.
There is still another part of the question that interests me. Why do we sometimes keep going backward after someone gives an answer?
“West Virginia.”
“No, before that.”
“Virginia.”
“No, I mean originally.”
“Cameroon.”
At some point, the search stops. We have apparently reached an answer deep enough in the biography to count as where the person is really from.
But why there?
There are many possible reasons, and it would be unfair to assign the same motive to everyone who asks. Sometimes it is curiosity. Sometimes an accent prompts the question. Sometimes people are looking for common ground: perhaps they know the same country, city, language, school, or community. Questions about origin can be invitations to connection.
But they also help us locate one another socially.
Nationality, region, language, occupation, education, ethnicity, and family background all help make unfamiliar people more legible to us. “Where are you from?” may therefore do more than locate someone geographically. Sometimes it helps us decide which social map to place them on. My childhood experience in Cameroon matters for precisely this reason. I encountered this phenomenon long before I crossed an international border.
I was not an immigrant being asked to explain my foreignness. I was a child living in my own country. Yet where I lived could still be insufficient as an account of where I was from. We were French-speaking in an English-speaking town. There was another place before the one I remembered.
Years later, the same question operated at a different scale. In the United States, “Cameroon” could be enough. Among Cameroonians, it could be almost meaningless. The question zoomed in: which region, which town, which community? The geography becomes wider or narrower until the answer supplies the kind of information the questioner is actually seeking.
Seen this way, “Where are you really from?” is more complicated than either an innocent question or an offensive one. It can be either. Its meaning depends on context, relationship, tone, persistence, and what the person asking believes the answer will reveal.
There is a meaningful difference between wanting to know more about another person’s story and refusing to accept that the place they named can legitimately be part of that story. Perhaps the more interesting question, then, is not whether we should ask people where they are from.
It is what we are trying to know when we ask.
I still answer “Where are you from?” However, I no longer believe there is one answer that will work everywhere.
If someone in Maryland asks where I moved from, West Virginia is true. If someone asks where I lived before West Virginia, Virginia is true. If someone asks my country of origin, Cameroon is true. And within Cameroon, another answer may become relevant. None of those answers makes the others false.
Origin, mobility, and belonging describe related but different things. Origin tells us where a story began. Mobility tells us where it traveled. Belonging tells us which places became part of the person along the way. Perhaps “from” sits somewhere among all three, changing its meaning according to where we are standing, who is asking, and which part of the story they are trying to understand.
So when someone asks me now, “Where are you from?” I can still give them a place.
I just know that there may be more than one truthful answer.
By Dr. Hélène
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