Where am I from?

A couple weeks ago my brother-in-law Jeff asked me what I tell people when they ask where I am from. I replied "I usually lie, or evade the question." Today I was talking to a co-worker about the same thing and it occurred to me, that I probably have a lot of friends who don't actually know my background. When I lived in Egypt and Jordan I usually told people from outside of my school (like taxi drivers) that I was from Canada or the UK. When I moved to Utah for the first time I used to tell people I was from Indiana, Maryland, Georgia, wherever. Then once in a while people would ask what high school I went to and things would get complicated. When I moved to England I just told the truth b/c nobody really cared that I grew up outside of the US and they didn't ask stupid questions about it. When I moved to Seattle I said "I just moved from England" and when I moved to D.C. I said/say "I just moved from Seattle", although I haven't lived in any of these places for more than a few months, or at most a year at a time. When I move from here, I plan to say "I just moved from D.C". Inevitably this leads to confusion when I drop a story about my Chinese/Indian friend in Ma'adi whose mother cooked the most amazing food, and the person things I was born and raised in corn-country Indiana. But what am I supposed to say? Where am I from? Here is a timeline of my life, maybe you can decide.

Born Oct 2, 1982 in Anne Arundel General Hospital, Annapolis, Maryland.
Nov (?) 1982 I moved to Sudan with my parents
Aug (?) 1984 I moved to Cairo for the first time with my family
Dec/Jan(?) 1988 (?) I moved to Maryland w/ my family
Aug 1990 (or so) moved to Tunisia
Jan 1990 evacuated back to Maryland
Sept 1991 (?) moved back to Tunisia
Aug 1994 (?) moved back to Egypt
Aug 1997 (?) moved to Jordan
Aug 1998 moved to Indiana
Jan 1999 moved back to Jordan
Aug 2001 moved to Provo, Utah
Dec 2003 moved to Indiana
Mar 2004 went to Provo MTC to learn Korean
Jun 2004 moved to South Korea
Oct 2005 went home to Georgia
Jan 2006 moved back to Provo-UT
Oct 2009 moved to York, England
Sept 2010 moved to Seattle, WA
Apr 2011 moved to Washington DC
Presently in Washington, DC

This doesn't include the number of times I've moved from city to city within a country, or the time I spent outside of the US doing study abroad, etc. I spent a month in Taiwan (supposed to be longer) studying Chinese, and I spend a total of about 3 months in Italy doing archaeology. So you tell me, where am I from? Where would you say? Its the 3rd culture kid enigma. I lived the longest in Egypt but I never really 'lived' in Egypt, and no I don't speak Arabic. D.C. is where I feel most at home after all these years, but I have only been here a matter of months. I think the reason I love DC so much though, is because it reminds me a lot of Ma'adi, and many of my formative years were spent in that Cairo suburb. II think it is all the trees, medans (round abouts), noise, crowds of ppl, awful traffic, close proximity (walking distance) btw home or work, they all just make me feel at home and comfortable, but neither D.C. nor Ma'adi are my culture.

This week I went to my first ghetto high school in greater D.C. It was a culture shock experience. It looked like a jail, there were no windows, two cop cars were parked outside and there were metal detectors to get in, it was run down and ugly, I felt gross being there. I was talking to a co-worker of mine who was born and raised in D.C. and her culture is not my culture. Perhaps partly b/c of our different ethnic backgrounds, but in many ways D.C. is not my culture, I don't know the subtle nuances, I don't speak the language.

I've been reading a book by a Times journalist who was raised in San Juan, CA but who was born in Iran and came to the US as part of the revolution-inspired diaspora. A big part of her book is learning to navigate two different cultures and decide which is her own, its all about her search for place, really. I can relate to a lot of what she says, the frustration of trying to relate to people, to explain your background, to defend yourself when you don't know some tidbit of pop-culture, the weariness of answering so many questions when you just want to live and be 'normal' and talk at social functions rather than explain your life story, the sadness of not really belonging in either culture and yet being a product of both.

Some people talk about a 3rd culture kid phenomenon that occurs in communities of ex patriots. I think it has a lot of truth to it. I don't understand the subtle nuances of my "own" culture (meaning American), nor do I understand or speak the language of the culture of the countries where I was raised. My culture is a 3rd culture, it isn't American, it isn't the Middle Eastern. I'm most comfortable moving frequently, socializing w/ people from a variety of countries and backgrounds, eating food that is not potatoes and meat, speaking English as a second language, enjoying small/close communities and viewing my "own" culture (Of America) as a partial outsider. But how do you explain that to someone who has grown up, or been raised in the same place, or mostly similar places their whole life? And how do you determine where you are from? Can you tell someone that you are from a nebulous non-country-non-place that has neither a location nor a name? Will they understand when you say you feel home sick when you hear the call-to-prayer or realize that you no longer have any Chinese or Indian friends whose mothers cook amazing foods? Or how do you respond when people criticize you for criticizing your own nation's politics and lamenting that you don't have a socialist health care system, or really old buildings and stuff?

I wish I had a passport to this non-place so people would take me seriously and stop asking me stupid questions like "What was that like growing up overseas?" as if I have anything to compare my experience to. At BYU I always wanted to get in with the Arab cliques, or any international clique really, but even there I wouldn't quite belong, I'd still be an outsider. I wish there was a way, as an adult, to go home, even for a day, to return to the life that I remember, to eat the food, socialize with the familiar faces, to soak up the rich cultural differences over steaming home made chipatis, I wish there was a community of ex-patriots that I could inject myself into, a group of people who would understand where I come from, but there isn't, you can't re-create my past and my home, not unless you're willing and able to move, and even then I think it would be difficult. What ends up happening is that you adjust, you adopt another culture (in my case American) as your own and try to settle, but inside you always know that you don't quite belong and that nobody will ever really understand and that you can never really get it back. Maybe I should just refer people to this blog post.