Not From, But Of （你来自于哪里）

By Esther Zhang, 17, Massachusetts

For the aunties and uncles who ask, where are your parents from?

I learn to say the answer before they finish the question.

On the public train, a grandmother pulls her grandchild closer.

I am fifteen, wearing my middle school uniform,

the same one she wore thirty years ago.

But my skin is the color of afternoon light

through a window screen, and hers is porcelain. 

She does not see the uniform.

In the supermarket, vendors switch to English

before I even open my mouth.

这个多少钱? I say,

and they blink, recalibrate.

“Your Chinese is so good! You sound just like a native speaker!”

I have spoken it since I was three, 

since I learned “baba” and “mama” 

before I learned father and mother. 

But my tongue is always a surprise.

International school is a country without borders.

We are Korean, American, German, Russian, Taiwanese, 

a parliament of passports.

Inside the gates, we are normal. 

Outside, I am translated.

Where are you from?

I say,这里.

They say, “No, little girl, where are you really from?”

In summer, my skin darkens.

My grandmother fans herself and sighs,

“So black now, you have to protect your skin more.”

She means it as concern.

She means stay inside, be pale, be natural, be beautiful.

I stand in the sun longer the next day.

My body is an argument

I am still learning how to make.

I am not from here, I am of here.

I know which 饺子 shop has the best sauce.

I know the sound of rain on sycamore leaves in early July.

I know the shortcut through the 故宫 palace.

I am not a guest in this city.

But I am always asked when I arrived.

We (too) the people—

the ones who carry two languages

in our mouths,

who are read like books

by strangers who think they know our story, 

who belong so completely

that our belonging is invisible

until the moment it is questioned.

I am of this place.

My skin holds the sun it gave me.

My voice holds its streets, its sounds, its pauses.

I am not the footnote to the story.

I am the story.

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Translations:

你来自于哪里 — Where are you from (literally “you come from where”)

这里 — Here

这个多少钱? — How much is this? 饺子 — Jiaozi (dumplings)

故宫 — The Forbidden City (Gu Gong) baba — Dad (colloquial)

mama — Mom (colloquial)

This poem was inspired by a lifetime of being asked where I’m “really” from by an old lady in Beijing (which is my hometown!). I grew up in Beijing till middle school and now live in Boston, so I know what it feels like to belong completely to a place and still be treated like a visitor from a foreign country. The poem is about reclaiming belonging. It’s about saying: I am not a footnote to this story. I am the story. 

Photo by Victor He