Why “Where are you from?” can be such a complex question
💍 It’s Friday, a word that comes from Old Norse for “Frigg’s Day” — which is often attributed to the Nordic goddess Frigg who rules over marriage, clairvoyance, and motherhood. In Latinate languages, Friday honors a similar goddess, Venus, hence “Vendredi” in French and “Viernes” in Spanish.
Also today: the mighty ellipsis and a terrifying lifespan chart
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“Where are you from?”
Here we go again.
“The Bay Area.”
“No, where are you really from? You know, China, Japan?”
In an essay on this vexing question,
describes how disorienting it can be to flatten your heritage into a single phrase, like: “I was born in the United States. I am American.”Yee’s father immigrated to the Bay Area from Taishan, a region in Guangdong Province. His mother was from Hong Kong, and both of his parents prioritized assimilating to American life. Later, Yee realized: “After decades of struggling to claim my space in America… I had to grapple with an uncomfortable reality. I didn’t know where I was from. Where I was really from.”
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the U.S. In the late ’70s, congressional staffer Jeanie Jew — whose grandfather immigrated from China to build the Transcontinental Railroad connecting Iowa to the Pacific — asked Congress to designate a month to celebrate the achievements of Asian American immigrants. She initially got a week. George H.W. Bush expanded the holiday to encompass all of May in 1990.
Why May? Two historic milestones give some context:
- One of the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the U.S. on May 7, 1843. His name was Nakahama Manjirō. He was shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific Ocean and rescued by an American sea captain. There’s a lot of nuance in this story if you dig deep: Nakahama was praised for his sailing expertise but endured racism in America, later traveling back to Japan.
- The Transcontinental Railroad was completed on May 10, 1869. A few years ago, historian Roslyn Bernstein commemorated the railroad’s 150th anniversary on Medium, quoting the President of the Museum of Chinese in America, who said: “After 200 years of being part of America, there are no Asian heroes in American textbooks because of the legacy of discrimination and racism. We are urgently presenting these stories… we cannot do our work fast enough.”
💬 From the archive: the mighty ellipsis
The word “ellipsis” derives from the Greek word “elleipein,” which means “leave out.” This punctuation mark’s power, designer
explains, lies in the possibilities it possesses. He takes us through the long and winding history of all the ways software designers have deployed these three dots — from buttons in Windows 3.1 to the “kebab” and “meatballs” menu icons you’ll find in most apps today. Saito’s story is a testament to how humans can interpret the same symbol in myriad ways.⌛ Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about the inevitable passage of time
“I stopped putting things off when I learned to see life as one big deadline,” confesses
before sharing the terrifying (and motivating) lifespan chart he created to remind himself how much time he has left on this mortal coil. I keep this bookmarked for whenever I’m feeling sluggish.Learn something new every day with Medium’s Daily Edition. Sign up here.
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