If you are an immigrant, you can easily be identified as one, partly from your look and partly from your accent. If you are living in smaller cities, in which people tend to be nicer and kinder, you may be familiar with what I am about to say. Being an immigrant is one story, answering some general questions about yourself is another story and it can happen in any random conversation you have with someone.
I always get a series of these questions like where I am originally from, how I ended up in Prince George, how long I've been here and how I like it.
I answer all these questions almost everywhere that I go and anytime that I meet someone new. But if we put being an immigrant and being questioned on one side of the story, now the other side is how people react to your answers. There are a few general categories for those reactions or at least that's what I have experienced so far.
Most of the time, when you talk about yourself by answering questions, people show excitement and interest. You can hear very nice and generous comments in this case. They admire you that made such a difficult decision and they give you some credit for dealing with this huge change. In my personal experience, the level of excitement in these kinds of reactions can go higher when they hear I have graduated from UNBC and I was studied computer science there. Sometimes, you may also need to answer questions about the weather and how winter is in your country.
I always feel good about this type of reactions.
Sometimes when you talk about where you come from, people know something about your country and try to lead the conversation by showing that. They may know someone or have a friend who is from the same place, for example, which is still friendly and nice.
But I've met some people who follow the news and they heard about my country . Most of them like to speak about all the political issues and discussions. They try to pronounce the name of the president and ask how he is doing his job. They talk about oil and war. It doesn't really matter if I try to correct them by saying that there is no war in my country, they still think the same thing.
I always think about how famous my country is only because of politics, but not because of its food, or nature or its history. I am feeling sad about it but the truth is one person is not enough to repaint the picture that the mass media has created of my country.
In some rare cases, you may meet people who tried to guess where you come from. Most of the time they get it wrong and you should learn not to become upset about that. But for me, the more interesting thing is that when I tell them the name of my country, it seems they've never heard it before. On my early days, I was thinking this is strange. But later I realized not everyone will always be familiar with a random country around the world.
Other times, when you meet curious people, they can have endless questions about everything. They want to know more and more, which sometimes can result in asking - from your point of view - silly questions. For example, I've been asked if we eat pizza and burgers in my country. That can make you angry as the same as it made me the very first time. But the point here is they simply don't know and you just need to learn how to handle these questions and reactions instead of reacting to them.
If you are not an immigrant, maybe you've got some ideas about how we feel about being in such situations. We would like to share our story with you. We just need a friendly environment to do that.
