Where are you from?

A staple question in small talk.

But have you ever thought hard about the answer to that question? I never thought much about it until numerous instances made me question how I should identify myself in regards to ethnicity and why it seems to matter to everyone.

There was this one time where one of my ordinary day-to-day conversations with my elder brother somehow turned into a crash course of how Thailand (my home country) became what it is today. I’ve always had my queries about the origins of my family as we have had a very long and complicated yet undeniably intriguing history of migration from various other places. Turns out, we have no ‘Thai blood’, we were just a set of migrants whom due to various circumstances settled in Thailand.

Truth is, if all of us trace back our family histories, we’d find something quite interesting: we are not born into a ‘nationality’, let alone an ‘ethnicity’. Sure, we have visibly different facial features, be it our hair colour, the shape of our nose or the colour of our skin- all of which distinctively set us apart. However, deep down, the things that ultimately sets us apart, wreaking havoc between numerous countries and heaps of people are merely social constructs. The passports that we hold, the nationalistic pride we hold, the history told from generation to generation claiming to reflect whom all of us are as citizens are the consequences of political relationships between governments. They in no way innately define who we are.

It’s ridiculous how your life chances are pretty much determined depending on where you end up first opening your eyes. The sad thing is that these chances are determined by external forces emerging from barely visible power structures, untouchable to the everyday ordinary man or woman. Despite how much you want to keep your head high and not be bothered by any of this, it won’t be easy. Prejudices, discrimination and subtle racism occur everywhere, many times subconsciously due to the internationalisation of normalised attitudes. We have made progress. But we still got a long way to go.

So next time someone makes you feel insecure about your race, just remember that we are all the same, living on the same earth, breathing the same air. No biological aspect makes one superior to the other. People will want to put thoughts that benefit them into your head.