Every now and then in Japan, this kind of conversation takes place:
Somebody: Where are you from?Herman: America.
Somebody: Where in America are you from?
Herman: Well... you see... uh... that is...
Okay, you're wondering, "How hard of a question can it be?" Man, you just don't know. Let me break it down simply for you.
- I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and lived there until the end of my elementary school years.
- My family moved to Atlanta before I started middle school.
- Before my sophomore year of high school, we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.
- After I graduated high school, we moved back to Birmingham, and not long after that, I went to college at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa).
- While I was still in college, my family moved up to Vancouver, Washington. After graduating, I lived there a total of 9 months before I moved to Japan.
Confusing, huh? I tell people in Japan that I'm from Washington state, to make things simpler. After all, that was where I moved to Japan from. But is that true? Am I lying to people? I don't have a good answer for that. Should I say I'm from Alabama? I spent about half of my life so far in that state. Plus, I was born there, and my grandparents and many family members live there. But my most recent memories of the U.S. are of Washington state, a place where I felt at home and had good times. What do you think? I wanna hear your comments on this one.
See, that's funny, because I always tell people you're from Hawaii, even though you only spent a few years there. Hey, man, if you consider yourself as being from Washington State, I don't think there's a problem with that.
ReplyDeleteI still think of you as Hawaian too, Herman, so when you talked about Hawaii earlier in this blog I thought, "So that's why I associate Herman with Hawaii."
ReplyDeleteIf I were you, I'd say Alabama, but hey, I have trouble with that question too. I'm not sure I can answer it without lots of qualifiers. My family's lived in Alabama the longest, but until I went to college, I never stayed in Alabama for whole years at a time. I was born in Maryland, but it's not as though we moved around the way most career military do. We just traveled a lot.
Can you guess how many places my parents have been since my youngest sibling got old enough to take care of herself? I can't.