IBARW: Don't ask me my nationality.

[kate_nepveu]

This is an American-only post, as I understand that "nationality" has different connotations in different countries. For the general version, which I fully agree with, see karaadora's post, "Where are you from?" "London" "No, where are you FROM?": why this annoys me and other stories. (Also, Supernatural fans, there is a link to a picture of her with Jensen Ackles.)

It is also part of a set with the previous post.

Dear fellow Americans:

Please stop asking me my nationality, or referring to other people of my nationality. Here in the United States, "nationality" refers to your country of citizenship. (See, news discussions about "foreign nationals.")

When you ask me my nationality, or tell me (in a very well-meaning way) that "other people of my nationality" have been having trouble finding glasses that fit because of the way our faces are shaped, you are assuming that I am foreign. That I am not, in fact, American. And since this is a long-standing stereotype about people of Asian descent, that we are foreigners, you are perpetuating a stereotype. You probably don't know that you're doing it, but it pisses me off. And now you know. So don't do it.

What you really want to know is where my ancestors came from far enough back that everyone around them had yellow skin. I'll accept, "what's your ancestry" or "ethnicity", though I have to say, why do you want to know? I don't go up to random people of European descent and ask them what country their ancestors came from.

Oh, and the same goes for showing off your knowledge of some Asian language by greeting me in it. Do I greet you, a perfect stranger, by saying "Ciao"? No. I know you think you're being polite and respectful. But you're not. And now you know. So don't do it.

Sincerely,

An American

(Chad does this nicely when asked, with perfect reason, if we're going to Japan because I have family there: "Kate was born in Korea, but she's from Boston." Which I will try to adapt, except that I would substitute "Massachusetts.")

(I say "try" because, for all that I am ranting here, it's really hard to come out and say this when someone does it in person. I'm working on it, though.)

(Also, on ranting: I'm doing this here, and somewhat in the last one too, because this isn't directed at anyone specifically, and because it does make me angry, and anger has its place—as does being polite. oyceter has a good post on this.)

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

All my curiosity was satisfied when you explained about the silent P in your name.

Srsly. "Where are you from?" I propose you practice your most stereotypical Brooklyn accent and respond with "Where do you THINK I am from?" (N.b. I imagine this will not be very effective in Japan.)

[kate_nepveu]

I don't object to curiosity from people who know me--the name *is* baffling, just for starters, and my ancestry *could* be important to me. People who know me, I want to not use the wrong term by mistake.

I very much object to random strangers' curiosity, because they might as well be wearing a sign saying "I think you are a foreigner!", which apparently gives them license to be intrusive, you know, as a bonus.

Can I do a Bawhston accent instead, maybe with another phrase? I don't think I can do Brooklyn.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

A conversation from a couple days ago, while I was working the ref desk:

Guy: Do you speak Chinese?

Me: No.

Guy: Do you speak Japanese?

Me: No.

Guy: What language do you speak?

Me: English.

Guy: What other language do you speak?

Me: My first and only language is English.

Guy: Hey, I just asked because I'm studying Chinese. Oh, are you going to give me these printouts for free?

Me: No.

The extra sad thing is that the guy asking me all these stupid questions was also a person of color; PoCs are not immune from absorbing the stupid idea that PoC = foreign. The smog of racism strikes again!

[kate_nepveu]

Boo, smog.

And he also thought he was being polite or friendly, too, I bet.

(Do library reference desks have secret padded bits for librarians to headdesk on? I bet it would be useful.)

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I've gotta say (and this is totally tangential to your point, I apologise), I have *never* understood the American obsession with ethnic background (or, more accurately, perceived ethnic background). It has confused me since I was a little kid. But that is a can of worms I don't want to open now (or probably ever, because I have no idea how to discuss it without offending just about every person I know, and then some).

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

I've gotta say (and this is totally tangential to your point, I apologise), I have *never* understood the American obsession with ethnic background (or, more accurately, perceived ethnic background).

I'm confused by your confusion...
I've never really given it much thought, because it always seemed obvious to me: we're a nation of immigrants, and a lot of people in the US really are "from" somewhere else, within the last generation or two (myself included-- my grandfather was born a few months after his parents arrived in the US).

The fraction of recent immigrants is smalller than it was a generation or so ago, but ingrained habits die hard.

[kate_nepveu]

Perhaps you're the person I should try my sports analogy on, instead: http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/243466.html?thread=2392842#t2392842

Which is to say, I don't perceive it as a general obsession. When people of European descent talk to each other, it strikes me as usually more like, "So, you like baseball?"

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, when the subject actually turns to names, I will ask people with unusual surnames where those names come from. They're as likely as not to be European. Otherwise I let the subject of ancestry alone; if the person wants to discuss it, they will.

For instance, you, Kate, mentioned in a previous post that you were not white. I've never met you, I had no idea what you were in that respect, and figured that either you'd eventually say or you wouldn't.

One niggle, though:

Do I greet you, a perfect stranger, by saying "Ciao"?

I've known people, not especially Italian in any respect, who do just that.

[kate_nepveu]

Substitute any random European-language greeting for effect, then. You get the idea.

[oyceter]

Arrrgh I hate that question! Partly because I know they are asking me because of the perpetual foreigner thing, and I am a little pissy because I will half fulfill their expectation of getting a foreigner. Also, because every time I'm asked it, I end up giving a short version of my entire life story ("Born here. Moved to Taiwan. Moved back. Yes I know my English is 'good.'").

And I hate people attempting to practice their random Chinese on me. Dude. I am not that impressed that you can say hello in Chinese.

(although I am very amused that a lot of people think I'm Canadian, since I think I accidentally picked up a Canadian accent from people at work.)

[kate_nepveu]

I know. I'm starting to be tempted to lie. (Unless it's to a Customs officer, where even if it might get me past extra screening, would be bad if they caught me.)

I've had Japanese and Chinese both tried on me, but never, as far as I know, Korean. (I ask, "err, what was that?")

[rilina.livejournal.com]

I am a little pissy because I will half fulfill their expectation of getting a foreigner.
I know! I lie and stubbornly tell strangers, "Philadelphia." Not their business that I spent part of my childhood in Asia. For friends, of course, the answer is different.

I will forgive actual Chinese/Japanese/Korean people trying to speak to me in Chinese/Japanese/Korean, but random non-Chinese/Japanese/Korean people trying to speak to me in Chinese/Japanese/Korean makes me so angry. I am not your free language tutor!

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I stop and force the person to rephrase: "Did you mean, 'What is my ethnic background', or do you really care that I'm from Los Angeles?" Sometimes I have no patience and say, "Planet fucking Earth." *shrugs*

One thing that niggles at me generally (not re: your post): people of East Asian descent and people who've lived in areas with high % Asian-descent populations are much more likely than anyone else to start guessing. For my part I prefer the questions, even the crude "What are you," to flat assertions, especially when (as rilina illustrated upthread) the assertions prove the extreme limitations of the person's assumption-set.

[ckd]

Sometimes I have no patience and say, "Planet fucking Earth."

I like this answer.

[kate_nepveu]

I'll add, in tangential response to your niggle, that I don't mind--well, I mind _less_--when staff in Asian restaurants address me in Asian languages, because when it's happened, it's had an overtone of "OMG, another Asian person!", being in suburbs not known for their diversity. It depends on circumstance.

I need to visualize giving a more pointed response to questions like this, to increase the chances that I'll actually do it.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I stop and force the person to rephrase: "Did you mean, 'What is my ethnic background', or do you really care that I'm from Los Angeles?" Sometimes I have no patience and say, "Planet fucking Earth." *shrugs*

One time, when I was in college, I ran into a woman I knew a little bit at a party the first night back from Christmas break.

"Hey, how was your holiday?" I asked.

"Why are you asking me that?" she shot back. "You don't care."

I blinked for a minute, then said "You're right. I don't actually care. But it's something to say..." I didn't have a whole lot to do with her after that.

I understand that it gets frustrating answering the same stupid question again and again-- hell, I get sick of answering on Kate's behalf that she's really from Boston ("She says 'wicked' and everything..."), and I would shed no tears if I never got another question about how tall I am or whether I play basketball or football. For the most part, though, those questions are well-intentioned attempts to make some sort of conversation, howeer shallow and meaningless, and I make the effort to at least keep my blow-off answers civil.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of Americans really are obsessed with their own and everyone's ancestry in a way that seems odd to me, especially as all of them seem to me so much more alike in being American than they are different in their individual subcultural ethnicities.
)

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That in itself makes it interesting. How would I be different were I genetically identical but my ancestors had never migrated here from Europe?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Obsessed among Western cultures, maybe, but hardly so compared to some non-Western cultures.

[od-mind.livejournal.com]

Um.

I'm interested in people's names and ethnic backgrounds for the same reason I'm interested in etymology. It's interesting history, and word-games, all in one. I can see that there are insulting ways to ask people about where their ancestors lived and what languages they spoke, but I (sorry) can't see anything weird or offensive about such an interest per se.

Just to be clear, I have just as much interest in 'boring' European names and origins as in 'exotic' Asian or African or what have you.

For all I know, this is an odd reaction to being, for the most part, 5th-or-more generation American in almost every direction up the family tree. Members of my family yearn for an interesting ancestor who didn't speak English and wasn't descended from English or Scottish or Scots Irish stock and wasn't born on a farm in Pennsylvania or Tennessee or Illinois. Tracking down the rare Swiss or German or French or Turkish(!) ancestors is thrilling; people who have interestingly different ancestors just a few generations back seem to us to have an unfair advantage.

So, I am interested that your ancestry is Korean -- but I'm just as interested that my wife's ancestry is Welsh, and that my best friend's is German/Sicilian. And the notion of foreign never comes close to entering into any of that, at least for me.

[kate_nepveu]

And you would probably say something like, "hey, I'm interested in names and ancestries, would you mind telling me about yours?" Or you wouldn't phrase it exactly that way, but because you are a polite person, and we've interacted, I'd probably answer and ask you why you wanted to know, and then maybe explain that bare-faced questions about my ancestry make me twitch for the reasons I said above. And that would be _fine_.

I was addressing two groups of people in this post. The first, is everyone who uses "nationality" to mean something they don't, because it's seen as a polite euphemism.

The second, and I admit this got conflated a bit so I am glad of this opportunity to clarify further, are the *strangers* who come up to me and either ask me my ancestry, or assume they know it and start speaking to me in tongues. Who don't go and do the same to the white people shopping in the same store. And those people can go bugger off.

Is that clearer?

Anyway, the capsule version of the name and my ancestry:

Adopted from Korea at three months, lived in the U.S. since. The name is French-Canadian (dad's family came from Canada in I think his great-grand-parents' time; his grandmother still spoke French-Canadian but I think she was born here). The "p" is silent, an old variant of a name without the "p." (Why anyone would add a silent "p" in the middle of a word is beyond me.) We apparently have cousins who use the original spelling.

[od-mind.livejournal.com]

Breaking news on the etymology front!

I just found a copy online of Aimar de Ranconnet's Thrésor de la langue francoyse, tante ancienne que moderne ("Treasury of the French language, both ancient and modern") printed in 1559. It's a French-Latin dictionary, and it gives nepueu as the entry meaning "brother's son". Given the typographical confusion between u and v at the time, I think that's a dead match. (Combined with a 1611 dictionary that gives nepheu, it also explains how it came into English as nephew.)

As for the surname Neveu, I'd assume that spelling is more common because it's more modern. Even surnames change over time, and names that mean something tangible will tend to track with the spelling of the day, or even drift to match a similar word that isn't related etymologically.

Thanks for giving me a fun one to look up. :-)

[kate_nepveu]

Awesome, thank you.

Familiarity is a funny thing--I'd been struggling with telling people how to pronounce my name for years, and then Chad said one day, "It's like nephew, but with a 'v.'" *light dawns* And it turns out he'd hit on the meaning, too, which is cool.

Completely off-topic

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

(Also, Supernatural fans, there is a link to a picture of her with Jensen Ackles.)

I saw that! I was going through IBARW posts last night and clicked through, curious to see what the poster looked like, and was all "PRETTY!!!!!!!!!" and then, "Oh, wait, isn't that Jensen Ackles?" and then, "*Oh!* There's another person in the picture! That makes sense. Brain functioning again now. Okay. IBARW. Right!"

*cough* Back to your regularly scheduled antiracism activities.

Re: Completely off-topic

[kate_nepveu]

The picture loaded really slowly for me, so I was wondering briefly, "is that her, because if so her skin is *really* pale," and then "wait, he looks familiar," and then I saw karaadora in the picture, and then I had to ask.

Anyway, I thought some people reading this might like to know. =>

[mdevnich.livejournal.com]

I get this question about my name, probably because nobody can pronounce it; but obviously without any implication that I'm not really American.

I'm also interested in people's ancestry, because several of my mom's relatives researched their geneology, and because my dad's ancestry was slightly "weird" in the suburbs I grew up in, so I ended up thinking about family background more. I'm sure I never accosted *complete strangers* with demands to identify themselves, how rude...

[kate_nepveu]

Want to try and convey the pronunciation in text, or would you rather wait?

I kinda get the genealogy interest, because to me it's history about my relatives, and I don't know as much about that as I should. But, like what I think you are saying, that's ancestry in a context.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Well. Okay. I'm just gonna say, I get asked this question all the time, and I look about as white as you can get without actually being vanilla ice cream.

(And then, when I answer "New Orleans", almost inevitably the follow-up is, "Oh, so then you speak French!" Which I do - badly - but that's only because I studied it in school, not because I'm from New Orleans. Most native New Orleanians couldn't speak French if their life depended on it.)

This is especially endemic in Los Angeles social scenes, probably because NO ONE is actually from L.A., and thus the question has a 95% probability of yielding an answer that will keep the small talk alive.

Does this bother me? Not at all. I'm always happy to gab about my hometown, and if people inquire further, "No, I mean where your family came from", I'm equally happy to dazzle them with my English/Irish/Scottish/German/Cajun French/Portuguese/dash-of-Native American-ness. Maybe it is an American obsession, but in a land consisting entirely of immigrants, I don't find it an especially peculiar one, and it is an obsession I'm completely guilty of.

I have noticed, however, that it seems to be most often folks of my acquaintance who are of Asian descent who are bugged by this question. I know this statement smacks of generalization/stereotyping, but it is overwhelmingly the case in my experience.

Now, I had been told (by at least four different people - one was Vietnamese, two were Korean, and the last was a white guy who had lived for a while in Okinawa) that the reason many people of Asian descent got annoyed by the question is because they found it insulting that people of other ethnicities should have trouble telling, say, a person of Japanese descent from one of Korean. Or, in other words, that they even had to ask.

Which, I'm sure, is an objection along the lines of "no, we don't all look alike just because we're all Asian", but I always found it, frankly, a little... disingenuous, or something. I mean, no, I can't necessarily tell a Korean person from a Japanese person at a glance, but I can't distinguish a French person from a German person that way, either. If the people in question are American by birth and have American accents it becomes even less obvious, and yet apparently it is still insulting.

That, I note with interest, is not really the objection you voiced in your post, and yet there that annoyance is, still. Which is why people of Asian descent are the only ones to whom I never pose that question. I don't want to insult people.

But I have to confess it annoys me, a little; I love discussing cultural backgrounds, and I find it's a great way to segue into talking about places people have traveled and cool things they've seen, and so on. Having to self-impose that restriction, and limit it to one particular group to boot, makes me uncomfortable. And yet, it seems that it is the only non-offensive way to proceed.

[kate_nepveu]

Judging by rachelmanija's post, "where are you from?" is definitely an L.A. thing.

No, the objections you've heard is not the objection I have. I'm noodling with the question of whether it's related to mine, but I can't really say without talking to someone who feels that way.

And yeah, you're right. Three ways--you're right that "where are you/your family from" doesn't mean what you _want_ it to mean to folks of Asian descent (for whatever reason); you do the right thing by skipping the question; and you're right that it's annoying to have to change your conversational patterns. Even if you could skip the segue and go straight into asking about travel experience, that doesn't remove the frustration you feel. Living in a society permeated with prejudice sucks, we deal with it the best we can, and sometimes we vent to blow off steam about how much it sucks. So, I hear you.