Where are you from? Not "just" a conversation starter

What you mean and what your conversation partner feels are not always the same thing.

Anne-Wil Harzing - Mon 27 Jan 2025 17:12 (updated Sat 10 May 2025 07:51)

© Copyright 2024-2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. First version, 27 January 2025

[Note: I was born and raised in the Netherlands, have lived in Belgium, the North of England, and Australia. Since 2014 I live in the London area. It is the place I call “home”. I identify more with the London area than with any other place I have lived in before. It is the place where I have retired.]

I’m privileged! I’m white. My light brown eyes and hair don’t make me stand out as visibly different. I can pass as a “local”. That is, until the locals see my last name (Harzing), which they usually assume is German. Or until I start speaking. Although I have worked in an Anglophone environment for nearly thirty years, I still have a non-native accent.

And that’s where the “fun” starts. The questioning, the attempts at classification... Where are you from? You speak with an accent (don’t we all?). The question will vary. It might sometimes be implied…

During the first two COVID vaccinations the main chit-chat by the British nurses and volunteers was about whether I was German or Austrian (after seeing my name). For the second jab I was asked about my nationality three times within the space of 5 minutes. I just smiled and complied, but what I wanted more than anything at that time was to connect with my local community. I was so proud of the way they handled vaccination and how well we were pulling together on this. Instead, I felt quite excluded at a time when I wanted to celebrate British pragmatism and its ability to improvise in the face of adversity, in many ways the exact opposite of the Germanic background attributed to me.

“You are not English”. The very first comment in my initial meeting with an English doctoral student. I was momentarily baffled. How did they know? I could well have had British citizenship. In fact, I would have had if the Netherlands had allowed this. I started to feel a bit insecure about my English-language skills and bumbled my response. What was meant as a meeting to connect on our common research interests ended up as something that left me feeling like an outsider. Again…

A lady with leaflets of a people’s vote march [shortly after the Brexit vote] that we met on leaving our local train station: “Please come, we want to keep you here” [after hearing us talk Dutch together]. How do they know we don’t have British nationality? Why is it them who have the agency to keep us? Why remind us yet again that we might be forced to leave the country that is our home? Why is about what they want? Yes, of course, I know she meant well, and she was trying to be kind to us. But why not say something like: “Please join the march, we are all in this together.”

Sure, this doesn’t happen every time I talk to someone, and it really isn't a big thing for me. But still… every time it does happen, I feel a little pang for not being accepted for who I think I am. Someone who has made the UK their home and has retired here. Someone who probably knows more about the UK’s social history than many of the locals. Someone who has likely explored more of the Greater London area than many of the locals; we have literally walked in all corners of it. Someone who feels connected with British culture so much more than with their birth culture; I am reminded of that every time I visit my birth country!

Your questions and assertions seem to negate all of that. You don’t mean it like that; I know. But what you mean and what I feel are not the same thing. Again…, I’m privileged. I am white. I was born in the Netherlands, a “neutral” country and one that locals do not typically see as threatening, criminal, or inferior. So, for me these questions are a minor annoyance. They might spoil part of my day, but they are usually quickly forgotten. For many others, however, they can be an almost daily reminder of being seen as an outsider in their own country.

[My local park with the medieval cathedral - foundations dating back to the 8th century - in the distance and the concrete building housing a Roman mosaic floor on the foreground]

Surely this is an innocent question?

Why do I get so “worked up” about this? Isn’t this just an innocent question? A simple conversation starter? Yes, I am sure it is for the person asking it. But it doesn’t always feel like that for the recipient. Especially if they hear this question multiple times a day and many that look visibly different do. Yes, it is only a little pinprick, but hundreds of pin-pricks can leave a pretty big hole.

Every time you get the question you need to make sure that you smile and respond graciously. After all you are now “representing” your ethnic/cultural/national group. The way you respond might well affect how your questioner views and approaches other representatives from that group in the future. Looking upset, angry, or annoyed is not an acceptable response, even less so for a woman.

Every time I do the mental gymnastics. Is this the time where I can act a little stroppy and say “St Albans” [the place where I live] or “Middlesex University” [the place where I work], fully knowing that this is not what they mean and I will be met with a puzzled, slightly irritated, or impatient look. Those who look visibly different often receive the follow-up question: No, where are you really from?

If you are a local asking this question, please rest assured. Some “non-locals” might interpret the “where are you from” question exactly the way you say you mean it. As a harmless conversation starter. But for many others it might be yet another reminder, in some cases one of multiple reminders a day, that they do not “belong” in the country they have made their home. That being different is a negative, not a positive, and that they face discrimination in many areas of their lives.

If you find it hard to understand how invasive or emotionally charged this question can be, how would you feel if people asked you one of these questions when first meeting you:

• “Are you married?” or “Do you have children?”
• “Are you homo-sexual or hetero-sexual?”, or “What is your gender identity?”.
• “Are you religious?” or “What is your religion?”

That’s none of your business you might think. For some of you, these questions might even be downright hurtful. What if you just broke up with your partner, have just lost a child or are unable to have children, are scared to “come out”, feel discriminated because of your religion? Surely, we can all imagine how these questions can be invasive and potentially upsetting?

But what these questions do is similar to the “where are you from” question. They all attempt to classify the recipient into a particular social category, rather than treating them as an individual that you would like to get to know on their own terms. Most of you would not dream of asking any of these questions as a conversation starter. Please understand that for many non-locals the “where are you from” question might fall in the same category.

Can’t I ask anything anymore these days?

Of course you can! You can even ask the “where are you from” question. But it is all about timing and context. The recipient will normally see it as a genuine expression of interest if you have known them for a while, or if it is asked in a social situation where everyone shares a bit about their background.

However, I would argue this is never a good question to ask early on in a relationship. Any question that requires the recipient to classify themselves in a single social category, one that may not even be very relevant to them, is inadvisable for a first meeting. For many, it will be felt as distancing yourself from them, even if you don’t mean it like that.

Ask yourself: do I really need to know this. If you feel you absolutely do, you could ask something like “have you always worked in [the local country]”. This could also be asked of a local who could then talk about their international experience. Even more indirect is “have you always worked at [the company / university they are at currently]?”.

But rather than “fishing” for someone’s nationality, why not ask something that emphasizes your shared identity? Surely identifying points of communality is what we normally do when building up a productive relationship? There are plenty of options. Here are some that focus on academia, but they could easily be adapted for any context:

• What draws you to academia?
• What projects are you working on currently?
• How are you coping with the current changes in the Higher Education sector?
• What do you like about working at [their current institution]?

If all else fails, just talk about the weather 😊. Or if you are having a meal, talk about the food. If your counterpart wants to voluntarily share their national/cultural background, this is a perfect neutral opening [I do/don’t like this food, because in my country/I grew up with…].

[Picture taken for my PhD questionnaire survey around 1995. For more on this, see: How to build strong research connections?]

Age trumps nationality?

When writing this note, it suddenly occurred to me that I haven’t heard “the question” as much in recent years as I did in the past. Why? Has my accent become a bit more British? Possibly, it may now take a full sentence rather than just one or two words before my conversation partner realises that I’m not a native speaker. But realising they do! Have locals become more sensitive to this issue? Possibly, but my impression is that most of my colleagues still get “the question” frequently.

Then it suddenly dawned upon me. I am getting older. I’ll be qualifying for my senior travel card soon. I don't look like that fresh-faced PhD student anymore (see picture above). As an ageing woman I am becoming increasingly invisible. If people do notice me, they see my greying hair and my increasingly lined face. This now marks me out as belonging to another social category: that of being “an invisible, but harmless older person”.

It means that the vast majority of people I now meet are younger than me. Even if they do notice me, they are unlikely to engage me in conversation. In their eyes, I am probably just an irrelevance. When meeting people my own age, we now share a social category that appears to “trump” my non-local category. Even locals for whom “the question” still comes naturally are likely to categorise me as “one of them” based on visual clues before hearing me talk.

Well… maybe that’s another reason why getting old really is not as bad as you think it might be when you are younger. At least I can now blend in. 😊

Related videos

Related blogposts

• Careers, mobility and belonging: foreign women academics in the UK
• How to hold on to your sanity in academia
• Female academics: Wives of the organization?
• Language barriers in multinational companies
• Managing (linguistic) diversity in MNCs
• Hablas vielleicht un peu la mia language?
• Should we distance ourselves from the cultural distance concept?

positive academia country-of-origin diversity edi cultural distance white papers

Reddit Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email