“Where are you from?”

Ukrainian flag (think of a field of wheat beneath a clear sky)

I get this question a lot, the asker ranging from genuinely curious to trying to fill in an awkward silence. I dislike this question, because I don’t know what the asker actually does and does not want to know. Here’s a list of interpretations from this Feministe post on the topic, with a few of my own thrown in:

• Where do I currently live? US (Seattle)
• Where am I a citizen? Ukraine
• Where do I identity as someone who belongs? US
• Where was I born? Ukraine (Kyiv)
• Where did I grow up? Ukraine (Kyiv)
• Where are my people from? Ukraine
• Where have I felt like I’ve belonged? US (esp. Oberlin)
• Where have I spent the longest stretches of time? Ukraine (but this will change to US in a year)
• Where have I spent the longest stretches of time while not being a child and actually remembering stuff? US, but not by a wide margin
• Where did I get my undergraduate degree? US (Oberlin)
• Where did I go to high school? US (Pittsburgh)
• Where do my parents live? US (Pittsburgh)

When someone asks me where I’m from, I have to figure out which of the above is most appropriate in that particular context. This feels very stressful, and I frequently feel like I get it wrong, presumably confusing the asker. This is a seriously bad way of filling in awkward silences with me.

Generally, I suspect that people really mean to ask “have you ever lived in any of the places that I lived, like town X, city Y, or country Z?” and when the answer is “no,” they really do not care where I did live. From my perspective, though, articulating the delicate gradations of that “no” is a source of stress and discomfort.

In summary, it would be awesome if people were more specific in their queries.

“Were you born in the Ukraine?”

No, I was born in Ukraine. Including the “the” is grammatically unsubstantiated, and is kind of a pet peeve for me.

“Do you speak Ukrainian?”

Not on a regular basis now that I don’t live with my parents, but I can. I can also speak Russian. Both were necessary for living in Kyiv for 11 years.

“Do you go back and visit often?”

I have no idea why people ask me this as much as they do, but I don’t visit especially frequently. A few times in the last decade, to visit my extended family, especially my grandmothers who contributed enormously to raising me. Also to check out all the cool (and really, really, really old by my American standards) tourist-y things I couldn’t care less about as a child.

The above picture, taken during the last trip in January 2010, features the main gate to the Mikhailivsky Sobor, which was arguably built as early as 1050AD.

“Are these really frequently-asked questions?”

Yes. First, I’m asked where I’m from, and, as I said, I never do well in knowing what people mean by that. Not answering “Ukraine” when it feels like the questions is really trying to get at that feels dishonest, both to others and to myself. So I’ll answer “Ukraine,” and now the conversation is, for better or for worse, derailed into the discussion of my Ukrainianness. That’s not a bad thing, though I’m left wondering, in retrospect, whether this was the asker’s intended outcome of the original question, and how this new conversation measures up to that. Then again, that’s the result of just about any vague conversation-starter.

“How can I learn more about Ukraine or the Ukrainian language?”

This is not nearly as frequently asked a question, but I’m putting it in here anyway.

For general information and lots of pretty photos, check out this page. All the panoramas and pictures mitigate the fact that the main-blurb-thing writer uses “the” in front of Ukraine and therefore warrants my seething I-disagree-with-someone-on-the-Internet ire.

For learning about post-Soviet Ukraine, I recommend reading The Burden of Dreams (here is my review of it). For learning the language, I recommend this book (my husband and I identified it as the best book for him to learn from). You can also learn a bit from livemocha, or by contacting me.

During the Jan '10 trip to Ukraine, I picked up my old cross-stitching tools, and Michael made some serious progress in learning Ukrainian.