Tag Archives: where are you from

Why Asian Americans hate hearing “Where are you from?”

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My brother Gary (on the right) and me at Kintai Bridge in Iwakuni, Japan circa 1965.

My brother Gary (on the right) and me at Kintai Bridge in Iwakuni, Japan circa 1965. Note that my brother is wearing a Cub Scout (or Webelos) shirt — we were both Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts starting in Japan, and I was even an Explorer Scout! How American can we get!

This has been a good week for sometimes contentious but bracing conversations on Facebook. The latest one started when I posted a link to an excellent Forbes article by Ruchika Tulshyan titled “‘Where Are You From?’ And Other Big Networking Racial Faux Pas”

The article raises the oft-aired complaint by Asian Americans that asking “Where are you from?” (sometimes linked to the even more irritating “You speak English so well…”) is a social, racial no-no.

I certainly can’t argue with that. I’ve written plenty about this very topic. I once criticized Martha Stewart for pulling the “Where are you from?” card, and in the post also included the conversation from my book, “Being Japanese American” that so many Asian American are all too familiar with, which starts with “You speak English so well” and veers off into “where are you from?” territory.

The Forbes piece quotes a South Asian news producer making a point that many Asian Americans should learn by heart and recite whenever we’re asked the question:
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“Where are you from?” conversation put on video by Ken Tanaka

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It’s amazing how many Asian Americans I know have had to suffer through this stupid conversation. In fact, I’ve met very few Asian Americans who haven’t heard the question, “where are you from?” or some variation, like, “You speak English so well!”

Or, having people come up to you, put their hands together and bow, and say “konnichiwa” in a bad accent, automatically assuming I speak Japanese.

What’s with that? Seriously, we don’t ask European Americans “where are you from?” and note how well they speak English…

Kudos to Ken Tanaka for coming up with this short comedic video that captures the frustration of hearing these lines. Tanaka is the nom-de-comedie of David Ury, a Sonoma native, standup comic and actor who lived for several years in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. While in Japan he developed a persona as the Japanese-speaking crazy foreigner, and Ury is also known as a manga expert and translator.

As Ken Tanaka, he’s built a YouTube following with videos in which he claims to be a white person born in LA but adopted by a Japanese family in the 1970s, who’s now back in America, searching for his birth parents.

UPDATE: The actors from the video are in a new video, reading some of the comments submitted on the “What Kind of Asian Are You?” vid.

Martha Stewart needs etiquette lessons for asking an Asian American, “Where do you come from?”

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Martha Stewart needs some etiquette lessons in how to speak to Asian Americans.A reader named Robin, who is Japanese American and born in Iowa and bakes apple pies, sent me this email:

“I was wincing yesterday when Martha Stewart asked an asian american woman in the audience (Sumi somethingorother, who baked an apple pie for Martha’s contest) “Where are you from?” and the woman said with no accent “Oh I’m from here…New York City.”. Martha continued with the (stereo)typical line of questioning something like ‘where are you really from because if you are from Asia it’s unusual to make an apple pie’. I don’t have it verbatim but it was painful. Just another “What ARE you?” type of conversation. I really don’t think Martha is a bigot but as she is the standard bearer of suburban white women I think it was totally disappointing for her to go down that path as if it were totally fine to question someone with Asian features about where they really come from.”

She sent a link to Martha Stewart’s page for the pie show, but there isn’t a video of the entire program, at least not yet. It looks like they only upload excerpts instead of entire shows, but I’ll keep an eye out for YouTube postings of this segment.

UPDATED: Today, Robin commented below on this blog post with a clarification:

“The video is up, check at the 2:00 minute mark:

http://www.marthastewart.com/article/meet-the-pie-bakers

“Verbatim it’s :
‘Where do you come from?’ (answer Here NYC)
‘Oh you do, oh, okay, because if you came from Asia this would not a typical pie, right?’ (answer ‘right…right…’ you can kind of hear the ‘what the heck!?’ in her tone)

“So it’s not as blatant as it struck me the first time but still the question and that type of follow up would be seen as really bizarre if she asked it of someone with a German name.”

It may not be as obnoxious as it could have been (I agree with Robin that Martha’s probably not a racist), but it still betrayed Stewart’s expectation that the audience member with an Asian face was a foreigner. She even sounded disappointed when the woman said she’s from New York, because Stewart wanted so badly to make her point about Asians not baking pies.
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