“Everyone’s from somewhere”. Most speakers of English know
this expression. I do not doubt this cliché’s intuitive veracity. However, I
wonder where that somewhere is.
I spent last Tuesday in Wrocław’s main square, talking
with a young woman. She was born of the first emigration from Poland to
Germany, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. She told me that she feels
more a part of her heritage in Germany than she does in Poland. While proud, she said that she practically dreads mentioning her Polish heritage in Germany.
Afraid she will become an object of ridicule. In Poland it’s a different story.
We both went to the same summer immersion program in
Kraków. There, she befriended one of the
program’s leaders. One evening he told
her that, as far as he was concerned, she was German. “I felt hurt when he said that” she told me.
Even as the third generation descendant of Poles who
emigrated to America I could empathize with this sentiment. I grew up in a
majority Chinese community. To my friends, I was always the Polish one. They or their parents were from China, or
Taiwan. Everyone had to be from somewhere.
Myself included.
In Poland, the same is true. Everyone is from somewhere.
But, the perceptions are different. In
California, I might as well be from Poland. In Poland, I am ‘the American’.
After class, the professor, a couple of my first-generation friends
and I got into a discussion. They told the teacher of their own dual life. Then
she jokingly asked me: “Of course, you
feel as an American.”
My parents raised me to be international. I never really learned
to play American football. Yet, from ten years old the highlights of my life
were trips abroad. Though I come from a country where relatively few have a
passport, I made a life abroad my goal. I settled on Poland as the place where I’d
like to build that life.
In graduate school, I was the only student to place at the highest level of the Polish course who did not speak the language at home. I’d be hard pressed to
say that I’m a main stream American. I’d never say that I’m completely a Pole either.
I tried to explain it. Telling my professor where I’d grown
up. Telling her that everyone is from somewhere there. Generations removed;
I didn’t know where I belonged.
“But you feel as an American, True?”
A couple of years ago
my parents told me the story of the lupe garue. The pet of a man who decided his dog was too bad for heaven and too good
for hell. It was doomed to walk the night as a ghost.
“We’ve raised a lupe garue” my father told me one morning.
I didn’t know how to answer my professor. Even though I knew
what she wanted to hear. Everyone is from somewhere. But that somewhere is differs according to
every person we ask.
I could chalk it up to a matter of perspective. I could let
it all go as a matter of national pride. All of that seems in adequate.
A birth certificate
might make one have nationality. But from where does that person truly come?
For my own part it's still a question I struggle to answer.
