ON: Where Are You From?

Thoughts from places

Song of the Week: “Homesick,” by Noah Kahan - “I’m mean because I grew up in New England”

My husband Taylor is from the whimsically named Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a town of around 50,000 people on the shores of Lake Michigan. It is a friendly, quiet place: bars and churches are abundant, vegetarian options less so.¹

Taylor grew up deeply enmeshed in the culture and traditions of Sheboygan: beach days and fireworks for the Fourth of July, snowy drives through the park ablaze with Christmas light displays, long walks to the lighthouse in every kind of weather. His childhood was defined by an unshakable sense of community and safety, and he carries a desire for that feeling with him everywhere he goes.

Sheboygan’s waterfront on the Fourth of July, 2017

Another thing he carries with him? Sheboygan’s quirky dialect. Like many people of our generation, Taylor’s Wisconsin accent is not as strong as that of his parents and their friends. He still, however, uses regionalisms that frequently throw me for a loop.²

To folks from Sheboygan, they’re not stop lights - they’re the much more even-handed “stop-and-go lights.” Until he was in university, Taylor called water fountains “bubblers”: a term used by folks from the Sheboygan area, some residents of Providence, RI - and many Australians. Most delightfully, when both options are roughly equivalent, Taylor won’t say that it’s “six of one and a half dozen of the other” - rather, he’ll say it’s “a horse apiece.”

This regionalism is so specific that it is instantly recognizable even when present in another world. Shortly after Taylor and I started dating, I was reading Patrick Rothfuss’s epic fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, and one of the characters said something was “a horse apiece.” I immediately texted Taylor, “I would bet you every dollar in my bank account that Pat Rothfuss is from your area of Wisconsin.” 

Thankfully for me, I was right: Rothfuss was born in Madison, Wisconsin, just two hours from where Taylor grew up. 

One of my favorite things about the United States is its colorful collection of dialects. Though television and the internet threaten to flatten language into one boring, homogenous mass, American English remains stubbornly regional.

This is wonderfully illustrated by the New York Times’s 2013 dialect quiz [gift link], which uses both word sounds and specific terms for weather, animals, and infrastructure to pinpoint a user’s place of origin.

It struggles, of course, with accents from outside of the United States: my Toronto-area accent, modified by years in Michigan and Colorado, registers as equal parts Boston, Buffalo, Grand Rapids, and Seattle. Where does it think you are from?

Eat Local

Two of the great pleasures of travel - inextricably linked - are language and food. From hushpuppies and po’ boys in the deep South to pain au chocolat and salade niçoise in France, travel allows us to taste the unfamiliar and often delicious. So many of my favorite travel memories involve regional food: sitting in a wildflower-strewn field in the Swiss Alps munching on bread and gruyère; drinking a huckleberry milkshake after a rainy hike in Grand Teton National Park; sampling peaty whiskey and vegan haggis on the Isle of Skye.³

When I don’t have the time or money to travel, I find that regional cookbooks are the next best thing. A good regional cookbook helps you understand food in context: the seasons, the traditions, the values, the celebrations. One of my favorite recent examples is Amy Thielen’s Company (2024). Thielen, a born-and-raised Minnesotan and former host of the Food Network’s Heartland Table, approaches the art of hospitality through the lens of life in a rural northern community. “When we want to get together, we don’t drive twenty-five miles to meet at one of the three restaurants in town; we go visiting,” she explains in the book’s blurb. “Which simply means that you go to someone’s house, check out their garden, their pets, and their projects, eat all of their food, drink their homemade alcohol, and toddle off into the night holding a jar of canned pickles.”

The back deck of Amy Thielen’s northern Minnesota home

Company contains catering suggestions for a twenty-person Thanksgiving, as well as a menu and drink pairings for a deer hunt. It unapologetically centers meat, and consistently prioritizes local and seasonal produce. I read the whole thing in a single sitting without once being tempted to make a single recipe, and yet I enjoyed every minute of it. When I closed the back cover, I could still smell the wood smoke.⁴

A good regional cookbook promises that most elusive of concepts - authenticity - even as it by necessity simplifies and compresses a region and its cuisine. Thielen’s account of Minnesotan cooking includes venison, hot dish, and thumbprint cookies, but it doesn’t encompass the incredible Somalian food you can find throughout Minneapolis-St. Paul, nor the crescent rolls and cake mixes from the Minnesota-founded Pilllsbury company.

There is no one correct or complete version of the cuisine of a region: just ask all the people arguing in the comments of Marcella Hazan’s famous bolognese sauce about whose grandmother’s village had the most authentic version of the recipe.

I love the way that J. Ryan Stradel handles this multiplicity of experience in his 2015 novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest. Stradel narrates the life and career of one extraordinary chef through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters, each in a chapter named for a significant food: lutefisk, venison, the catch-all dessert category of “bars,” and so on. No one perspective completely captures the protagonist, but together they offer the reader a feast.

Space and Time

I do not share Taylor’s deep connection to place. Oh, I love to travel, and I have a deep affection for lakes and for mountains, but I don’t define myself in terms of place the way that he does. This is, I think, in large part because I grew up Seventh-day Adventist.

Even within North America, their place of origin, Adventists are a unique subculture, defined by their marginal, outsider status and founding suspicion towards the triumphalist American project. As sociologists Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart describe in Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (2007), Seventh-Day Adventists developed their own educational and healthcare systems, cultural traditions, and language. I can go anywhere in the world and find people who also attended Andrews University, took part in Pathfinders, and ate haystacks at potluck. 

While Taylor went to Friday night football games and Saturday-morning Easter egg hunts, I was at AY and Sabbath School. As Bull and Lockhart write, “Adventists separated themselves from other Americans by choosing as sacred their own portion of time - the Sabbath…Adventists were content to share American space, to remain dispersed throughout the continent, but were determined not to participate in American time as manifested in the observance of Sunday and the expectation of an earthly millennium” (254). 

This sense that the earth was not our home was particularly true as a pastor’s kid. Historically, the Adventist church moved pastor’s families every couple of years, sometimes across the continent. I was unusually fortunate to spend eleven years in one church and house, but I still lived in constant anxiety that at any moment our family would be forced to move somewhere new, without any say in the matter. And so I rooted myself in the things that felt safest - in books, in my family, and in my faith. 

Taylor grew up in the bratwurst capital of the United States. Where I’m from, we ate Big Franks.

The New World

As any immigrant or ethnic minority can tell you, “where are you from?” is often a loaded question. The implied answer is “obviously not here.” For first-generation immigrants, the question signals immediate otherness: the implied insistence that they will always be visibly different, will always be excluded from a cultural concept of normal or even authentic. 

For second- or third-generation immigrants, and for multiracial people (both categories I fit into), these questions can raise even more complicated feelings. There are countless memoirs and essays out there by authors who grew up feeling alienated from their majority white communities, then visited their parents’ countries of origin only to discover that they were seen as hopeless outsiders there too. Often, a hybrid experience feels like a rootless one.

In her short story “To the New World,” Ryka Aoki explores the perspective of Millie Wong, a newly out transgender woman whose Vietnamese refugee grandmother recently died. Wong struggles to feel comfortable and accepted both as an American and as a woman, and questions whether her grandmother would have understood and accepted her if she had known the truth about her gender identity. After spending most of the short story frustrated and torn, Wong finds peace while eating a pork bun she saved from a recent visit home:

The scalding pork filling burned her tongue, but instead of bringing tears, the pain brought memories. There was a rush of spices and aromas and tastes, a rush of family and faces and sounds. She remembered moon cakes and pork buns and screaming kids and beating her cousins at poker late into the night. Violin from Suzuki and math from Kumon. Smuggling bags of dried cuttlefish into the movie theater, and Costco beef jerky into Disneyland. She remembered all these things, and so much more. (61)

Ultimately, Wong concludes, she and her grandmother were both immigrants - and though they might never have fully understood one another’s experiences, she can still find meaning and solidarity in her grandmother’s journey far from home. 

My Tennessee Mountain Home

Sometimes, that recognition of shared heritage comes from unexpected places. I recently listened to the fantastic podcast miniseries Dolly Parton’s America, created and hosted by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. Abumrad had the opportunity to do the podcast because his father, a Lebanese immigrant and doctor, befriended Dolly Parton after treating her following a minor car accident.

Dolly Parton’s America traces the larger-than-life country singer’s upbringing and career from rural Tennessee to the international stage, and asks fascinating questions about gender, sexuality, race, class, and politics. My favorite episode, however, is “Neon Moss,” which explores Parton’s famous “Tennessee Mountain Home.”

In the episode, Abumrad’s father Dr. Naji Abumrad explains that he and Parton connected because they grew up in similar rural mountain towns: him in 1960s Lebanon, and her in 1950s Tennessee. Jad recalls a family wedding twenty years earlier when he saw his father’s childhood village for the first time: “It’s high up in the mountains, actually the exact same elevation as the mountain where Dolly lives. The air sort of has that exact same kind of thinness to it. And when we finally got to see his house, it looked a lot like Dolly’s.”

Dr. Abumrad and Parton’s connection echoes a sentiment expressed in the previous episode by Estaco En Cara, a Kenyan singer most famous for gospel songs and Dolly Parton covers. Growing up on a farm in the rural hills, Cara often hiked up into the mountains and sang Dolly Parton songs to herself. “For me, my Tennessee was those hills where I come from,” she says. Cara’s eventual movement from the hills to urban Kenya reflects a global shift from rural life to urban centers - and the nostalgia and homesickness that comes with it. 

“Neon Moss,” concludes with a deep dive into country music’s musical similarity to traditions from around the globe. Perhaps, Abumrad muses, Dolly Parton’s music articulates a nostalgia and uprootedness that people can relate to regardless of how different their cultural backgrounds may seem to be. Parton’s music, he argues, is “immigrant music.” 

Let Us All Be From Somewhere

One of the first regions I loved in specificity was southwestern Michigan.

During the four years I spent going to university in Berrien Springs, I spent countless hours on the beach in summer sun and January deep freeze. I picked concord grapes, peaches, and apples, listened to bluegrass at summer festivals and watched fireworks over Lake Michigan.

I complained about icy roads and black flies, and I developed a passionate devotion to the subs at the Baguette de France sandwich shop. I was immersed in a large and diverse Adventist community, but I was also open to the geography of this place - a place I knew I would be able to stay for four years at least. I let Michigan sink deep into my bones. 

I think that’s why, whenever I return to the state, whether I’m there to visit or just passing through, it feels like a kind of homecoming. I spent two days in Michigan this week, and as the parallel lines of dark trees appeared on either side of the wide, cracked highway, I thought - as I always do - of Bob Hicok’s wonderful poem, “A Primer.”

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical 
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget 
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing. 
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now 
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother, 
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing, 
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere. 
Let us tell each other everything we can.

When it comes to “Where are you from?”, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. Your best options are essentially, in order, 1) the wonderful coffee shop Paradigm, which has great vegan food; 2) Toy’s Restaurant (the local Thai place), and 3) the frozen section of the Pick ‘n Save, which recently started carrying Beyond Steak!

2. “A Way With Words,” a charming long-running radio show, explores all manner of word-related puzzles and questions, and frequently features deep dives into odd regionalisms and their origins.

3. It’s mostly carrots and oatmeal.

4. If you’re an armchair gourmand like me, I highly recommend your local public library for all the cookbooks you could desire.