I’ve lived in the US for 25 years, and there are three things people still say to me when we first meet that I don’t enjoy. They’re all meant with kindness, but they always land poorly with this immigrant.
“Where are you from?”
In my first years in the United States, I didn’t mind this question. It sounded like an icebreaker, but I mind it now. It comes before any other question, sometimes even before my name, because the person has heard my accent and wants it explained before we go on. It tells me that my accent is the first thing about me, and that everything else can wait. For a while, I answered “Texas,” just to mess with people. These days I answer “Seattle” first, on purpose. The question comes again, and I answer “Romania,” because the exchange doesn’t end until I do. That’s what makes it coercive. My first answer isn’t accepted, and I’m not done until I’ve given the “correct” one.
“You speak English so well.”
I know it’s offered as a compliment, and I reply with a cold thank you. But nobody says it to a person born here, so what it means is that my English is good for someone like me. My English was good enough to get me through my interviews with the US software company that hired me back in 2001. It was good enough for a master’s degree in creative writing. It was good enough for three published novels. It’s also true that it will never be a native speaker’s English. When I’m tired, my words are harder to find, and even the tiniest mistake reminds me that I’ll never speak English like a native. To make things worse, I’m sometimes amazed by the mistakes native speakers make that I never would (the subjunctive comes to mind), but those people don’t carry the burden I carry, which is to sound perfect in English at all times. Then again, Romanian is a Latin-based language, so I understand the long Latin-rooted English words that many native speakers have never learned, and the Greek ones too. My English is different from theirs, not worse. It’s good enough not to be mentioned.
Romanian trivia
The third has no fixed wording, and it doesn’t usually come as a question or compliment. It happens after the person has learned where I’m from, and they try to show me they know a thing or two about Romania. Dracula. Nadia Comăneci. Budapest. I’ve never read Dracula, which was written by an Irishman who never set foot in Romania, and I only found out that vampires mattered to anyone after I arrived in the US. Nadia scored her perfect 10 in 1976, before I was born. And Budapest is the capital of Hungary, a different country with a different language (I still don’t understand how the two get confused so often). None of it is about me or about the Romania that is meaningful to me. So I politely correct Budapest, and I don’t smile at Dracula or Nadia, because I don’t want to encourage that line of discussion. Then I move on to the rest of the conversation, which can now finally begin.
What these remarks have in common is that they treat me as a category instead of a person. You can hear it in the lines themselves: Where are you from, so I can place you in a box. You speak well, for one of you. Here’s what I know about your kind. It’s a small thing, and it’s over in a minute, but for that short period of time, I’m reminded that I don’t belong, even though I’ve lived in the US longer than in my native country.
I meet new people all the time, and telling one of them the truth about how this lands won’t make the next encounter go any better. So I keep the damage small and move past these three as fast as I can. I’m only speaking for myself here, but I know other immigrants who also dislike them.
And because I’m a writer, I poured my lived experience as an immigrant into a novel, my debut legal thriller, Extreme Vetting. Its protagonist is a Romanian American immigration lawyer, who hears these remarks all the time, mostly from people who mean well. I didn’t have to research that part.
