the pub Cachipún:
My Experience with “So, where are you from?” Christine Kindberg
When people ask me where I’m from, I have no
and her guagua and let us go to the front of the line. I still have that passport, long-since expired, buried in the deep pockets of my dad’s file drawer of important papers. I travel with American documents, because it’s easier, but the old Peruvian passport is priceless to me because it is tangible proof that countries other than the U.S. have a claim on me. Without that burgundy vinyl passport, I would have nothing tangible to show for having lived most of my life outside of the U.S. except for stamps on the pages of American passports, as if I were just another tourist.
answer. I hate this question. Strangers always expect a city and state, preferably somewhere they’ve been. But I have to tell my life story—measured, as it is for me, in countries. I was born in Peru, moved to Kentucky for my first three and a half years, lived in Chile through fourth grade, moved back to Kentucky for two years, lived in Panama for seventh grade through eleventh, and then had my senior year of high school in North Carolina, where I still visit my parents during breaks from my college in Illinois. There is no simple answer to where I’m from. When I go through the details of my story, people stare at me with eyes glazed over and nod politely or look at me with surprise and tell me excitedly about their mission trip to Jamaica, as if that made us neighbors. It’s easiest if I can just shrug and answer vaguely, “I’m a missionary kid; we moved around,” and generally mention Latin America. It’s simpler if I skip particulars among people who don’t understand the differences between countries and who don’t know what it’s like to be the daughter of an American Southerner, born in Lima, climbed trees in Temuco, and read Cervantes a stone’s throw from the Panama Canal. In twenty years, I’ve lived in eleven houses, seven cities, four countries, three states, and two continents. I am a third culture kid, someone who’s lived in enough places to not belong to any of them, someone who identifies with neither my parents’ culture nor my host culture, but with a no-man’s-land in between.
I am an American citizen, but I learned “The Star Spangled Banner” in a Chilean elementary school. Five of my eight great-grandparents were born and reared in Kentucky, but I knew the geography of South America before I learned state capitals. By kindergarten, I spoke Spanish like a native Chilean, but in fifth grade I had to read the fine print on my lunch money to know how much a dime was worth so I could buy a small carton of milk. Geographic loyalties are hard for me—they’d be much simpler if I could identify with just one place. During elementary school, I was a well-socialized Chilean for the most part. At home, we were American because we spoke English and celebrated the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. At school, I could easily forget those differences. In English class I repeated words from the chalkboard with my classmates, mispronouncing the same things they did. I tried not to let my face get too red when the music teacher introduced the new, American songs we were to learn: “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” At school, I spoke Spanish with my classmates’ slang and played recess games the Chilean way. I called out “cachipún”
When I was born, my parents got me a Peruvian passport. They stood in a long line under the hot sun until people around them took pity on my mother
5