What Does It Mean to Move or Be From Somewhere?
My Time as a Human is a longer format essay style blog intended for the general public. The scribblings are being crossposted here for your convenience, but please feel free to visit the site itself, http://mytimeasahuman.com
I remember the moment clearly. I was standing with my beautiful little friend Juliett on a bridge on a farm in east Texas. Someone had just discovered that she was going to Italy. “Wow,” she said, “that’s so exciting! Are you moving there?!” Juliett paused and thought about it for a minute, looking slightly puzzled. “Well,” she said, “I have a one way ticket and I’m bringing everything I own. Is that moving?”
People often ask me where I’m from. I tell them, “Austin, Texas”. But I grew up outside of Chicago. Some would say I was “from” Chicago. But of course, I was born in Hamburg, Germany, even though I only lived there for a year. I suppose most accurately I’m “from” my parents.
Both of these questions seek to quickly know a person. When someone asks me, “where are you from,” the core of the question is about understanding what shaped me, what kind of person I am, if I can recommend good restaurants there, and if I might know their brother in law. It’s a conversation piece (in terms of restaurants and brothers in law) but also a way of putting me into a convenient box, the “midwestern” box or the “hippie” box. It’s for this reason that I use Austin as their reference point. Despite traveling all over the world, Austin, like no other place, felt like home the minute I arrived. As a box, it fits well enough. I like natural food and hippie things like yoga, but I also like to throw on a cowboy hat and work hard building things in the sun. The suburb where I went to high school has fewer of those things, and wouldn’t stand a chance at giving someone that visual.
Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping in a basement in Chicago, and the nights before that in D.C., people still refer to me as “living” in China. It certainly best defines my headspace at the moment. I’m taking a break here to recover, but I have a long way to go learning Chinese and extra pairs of underwear in a garage in Fuzhou. If I really thought about it, I’m not sure I’d say I live anywhere at the moment.
I do believe that places shape us as well as represent us. In all of this talk about “moving”, “living”, and being “from” places it’s interesting to think about what list of places would best give someone a sense of me. If I were going to get a list of places tattooed down my ankle, that would define me to someone who found me sleeping, what would they be? Through my parents I’ve been heavily influenced, and defined, by places I’d never been in Europe. I would have listed China long before I began “living” there these last nine months. Austin and St. Charles would have to be on the list along with the Punjab in India.
What would your list be? Do you wish there were more places on it?