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where we hail from
The University of Michigan boasts a student population hailing from all fifty states and many countries abroad. I dug a bit deeper than "Where are you from?" to find out how some of these students have come to understand "home" through their own experiences.
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"I guess home is wherever I’m with my family, but that’s also an odd thing for me because my mom is adopted. We don’t really know our roots entirely. People have this idea of the homeland, but I don’t really have that. I do have this sense of my core family though, of my mom, my dad, and my brother, and I guess hanging out with them is where home is. Pittsford [New York] is a very rich community. People are definitely very well off, we have very good public schools, and people are very proud of that. But, I don’t know, it’s weird. I know I’m from a very big place of privilege, and that’s probably what shapes my worldview the most. I know that my community is not what everyone gets to have."
"What do you mean by where I'm from? I would say from Ann Arbor, Michigan, because I've been here for six years now. But, I would consider my hometown [Columbia], Missouri because I lived there for thirteen years of my life, so that's
the longest duration. I wouldn't say I'm from
there though. When I first meet somebody, I
just say I'm from Ann Arbor because that's the most immediate thing in my life. Whereas home, it's a bit more like, who defines me? And that's Missouri because I've been there forever. That's where I grew up, where I met most of my friends, the first experiences I've ever had; it just kind of set the foundations of who I am."
"I’ve lived in Ann Arbor my whole life, so I would consider it a hometown to me. Most people grow up in one town or maybe even more than that and they go off to college and generally it’s a different environment so that shapes how they perceive the world and how they shape themselves. For me, it’s a little different since I've never left Ann Arbor. I wouldn’t say it’s sheltered, but it’s just one environment I’ve ever really been in. So, that’s definitely affected the way I’ve become."
"I think home is just comfort. It’s being in a place where you don’t feel lost everywhere walking around; where you have a combination of your bearings but also a group of people with whom you are close and feel comfortable in that aspect. I don’t know. That is a fundamentally difficult question because I really don’t think there’s a right answer, and that’s the thing right? When you’re home in your hometown, you feel comfortable, because it’s a place where you presumably lived for a long time, know well, and know the people, and know all the restaurants, and know all the stores, and you know the neighborhoods. You know how to get around. It’s that ease that comes with being in a place that you just know, and you don’t have to be constantly under some sort of stress of learning or trying to find your way. It’s more just like you. I guess I’ll just roll back to comfortable. It’s a place that you’re comfortable. I think I’ll just leave it at that."
"To me, home is a place where you feel safe enough to be yourself; with people you know and trust. I was born in Pakistan. There, I grew up in third world poverty where the basic resources like food, water, and electricity were scarce. When I came to Grand Rapids [Michigan], it was a whole new world for me, but we were still in poverty here. We tried food stamps and subsidized housing to live. I went to very diverse schools, although they were low quality. So far, I've only experienced the low end of two societies - that's shaped who I am."
"When I think of home, I think of my origins. It’s where I feel I have a community. I call home Morristown [New Jersey]. I want to say Morristown can be defined by diversity, but it was more like divisions. I do think my high school had a pretty diverse population though. That was a really big deal for me, and I feel like being exposed to people who look different from me since I was really young shaped me a lot. "
"Home is a really weird thing. Miami’s my hometown, but I don’t feel any emotional attachment to it. I don’t want to go back there ever permanently. But, also that changes depending on the people there. So it’s really for me about who is around me.Growing up in Miami definitely makes me more tied to being Latino, because everyone is [Latino] there, so it’s something that you think about a lot. It’s also so different compared to most every other city in America. It still feels like Latin America down there. It feels like I grew up way more in Latin America than in America. So, it makes it feel a little bit more unique. "
"I feel like for someone to feel like they have a hometown, it means that they have to grow up in the same place their whole lives. That’s what I thought “hometown” was when I was growing up. So, I guess no, I don’t have a hometown. Honestly, I’ve never really travelled, I haven’t seen the world, so I don’t really know yet how the places I have lived so far have shaped me as a person."
"[Grand Rapids, Michigan] shaped me in a way that I don't necessarily want to be. The people who influenced me [in Grand Rapids] were not necessarily the people who I would prefer to hang around now. It was a very conservative upbringing. My family didn’t necessarily fit in to the little boxes that they had there. So, it didn’t feel like the best place or the most constructive or healthiest environment to grow up sometimes. Even though we were very well off, other than that we didn’t fit in to their little white, conservative boxes. So it was very constructive in the way of noticing how I didn’t necessarily fit in there - I wasn’t always the most welcomed - and then getting out of that environment, knowing that that’s not how it should be."
"I grew up in Frostburg, Maryland. It’s a very rural, farm town kind of place. So, I love big cities because of that. Yeah, I definitely appreciate population density more, which is kind of odd, but it’s a noticeable thing."
"Home is where you were born and where you lived for your childhood. That’s the simplest and most concrete definition to me. But, I think as I’ve moved away from Bethesda, I’ve become more critical of it. It’s mostly white, kind of older-ish parents, and so it’s one of those places where we call it a bubble – Bethesda bubble. When kids leave it to go anywhere else, they’re surprised. So, I think Bethesda would be a better place if it was more diverse economically and racially. I guess positively, growing up in Bethesda probably made me value education, because that was a big value there, and maybe negatively, I just, you know, didn’t get to experience a lot of cultures, different kinds of people, different kinds of Americans because it’s really homogenous."
"I'm originally from China, but I moved a lot when I was younger once I moved do the United States when I was five. So, I don't really have a hometown, but I call Ann Arbor my home. It's the place where I've lived the longest, and the place where I have the most friends, and my family is here. I think home is where people you care about are and people who care about you are."
"I moved around a lot, so I wouldn't say I have a hometown. But, I guess I could attribute a lot of the things that I am now to living in Glen Ellyn [Illinois], which was a white middle-class suburb, and that comes with certain values. But also, my parents were a little bit different from everyone else I lived around. I didn't exactly fit in there. So, I can say that the exposure I've had from the people in my life was always greater than where I lived."
Remediation
SHAYLYN
AUSTIN
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