New on Our Substack: “So… Where Are You From?”
For most people, “Where are you from?” is small talk. For anyone raised between countries, languages or cultures, it can open a stack of other questions. Where was I born? Where did I grow up? Where does my family live? Where do I actually feel at home? Often those have different answers, and none of them feels complete on its own.
Sociologists Ruth Hill Useem and John Useem first described the “third culture” in the 1950s, while studying families who lived between their home country and the country they had moved to. People raised this way often build a third space out of pieces of both, and many come to locate belonging less in a single place and more in relationships and shared experience.
That idea sits at the heart of our first Substack essay, So… where are you from? It follows one person’s answer across several countries and cities, and it ends by offering a different question: not “Where are you from?” but “Where do you belong?”
If you’d like more on the research behind this question, we explore it here on the blog in “Where Are You From?” Why a Simple Question Feels Complicated for Third Culture Kids. And if the question has ever left you pausing longer than you expected, you’re not alone.
