Re your first poll:
I’m white, or so the census instructions firmly tell me; and it’s happened to me, more than once. But that’s because apparently when I get a good enough tan on I look pretty ambiguous; or at least I look to a lot of people like I’m not “from here”.
Didn’t vote.
Honestly, as a Chinese-American, I really only ever get this question from other Asians. And they never really seem satisfied with the answer for some reason. The question is always posed as “Where you from?” and it’s always from another Asian with a heavy accent.
I get that what they’re really trying to ask at least 99% of the time, but clearly don’t have the English skills to formulate the proper question, is whether I’m Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. They want to know what flavor of Asian I am. For some reason, this is critical information to a lot of Asian people. Depending on what kind of mood I’m in, I’ll either just tell them “I’m Cantonese” right off the bat, or I’ll just go along with their interrogation:
“Where you from?”
“Right here. I was born in Washington, DC.”
“No, where you parent from?”
“Actually, they were both also born in America.”
“Oh… grandparent?”
“Also American born. My great-grandparents are the ones who came over. 1800’s, if you can believe that.”
“Ah. Come from where?”
“Guangzhou. We are Cantonese.”
“Ahh…”
I’ve had that exact conversation or something very close to it literally hundreds of times over the course of my life, with people all over the world, every single one of them another Asian.
Ditto
Similarly, I’m Jewish, and i get it from other Jews. And they generally do have the English skills to ask “where did your ancestors live in Europe before they came to the US?” They want to know what branch of Jew i am. My answer is complicated, but there’s nothing unexpected about it, so it would be weird for someone to correct me.
I’ve had sort of a similar experience. I’m about as WASPish as they come, but “Magill” is a very asian sounding name. I’ve been asked (usually over the phone) where I’m from. I usually tell the truth, that Martin Magille had received a land grant from King James in the seventeenth century, and that in my case, Magill is an Anglo-saxon name, derived from the Magill Magna river in the West Country.
I’ve once been told by a prospective land lady that she doesn’t usually rent to “you people” because she had cats, but I sounded like I was one of the “good ones.” Needless to say, I declined to rent from her.
I’ve also gotten invited to visit the Mandarin Church of Cary, only to be told I was disrespecting my heritage because I didn’t speak Mandarin.
My favorite tale though happened to my brother. He once came home to a message on his answer machine. We don’t know whom this fellow was calling or what he did, but the caller was PISSED. There was a two minute long angry rant in (we assume) Chinese, punctuated with a heavily accented, “And when did you learn to speak English!!!?”
Really? Not to me.
Funny, you don’t look Magillish… 
About half of my DNA is from Germany, and when I was a teenager, I was very blond, stocky, with a buzz-cut. I looked a bit like a Prussian cadet. One of my teachers once asked me jokingly (in front of the class) whether I believed I was superior to non-Aryans. Without a pause, I said, “No, I believe I’m superior to everyone”. It got a big laugh.
This is interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it from other Jews; at least, not in that sort of general form. Or maybe what’s going on is that I don’t take ‘where did your ancestors live in Europe before they came to the US?’ to be the same question as ‘where are you from?’
I’ve been asked the question in the form of ‘where are you from’ or the rather more unnerving ‘what are you’; or in the form of ‘are you x’ when ‘x’ might be almost any group seen as some shade of brown and at least once Black (but, interestingly, I don’t think anybody non-Jewish has ever guessed Ashkenazi, though people have guessed Arabic.) And it’s nearly always been people who clearly meant ‘you are some sort of odd and I want to know what sort’; though once it turned out to be somebody Native American who was asking me whether I also was. He immediately recognized my reaction, however, and straightened out that he was asking whether I was part of his ingroup, not placing me in an outgroup. Which is also what other Jews are doing if asking in some form whether I’m Jewish, of course.
“What are you” is particularly unnerving when being asked by a group of other six year old schoolchildren when one is six oneself and doesn’t understand the question. My mother understood it fine, though, when I got home and asked her.
Some people who ask ‘where are you from?’ genuinely ask that of everybody they’re just meeting as a sort of casual conversation starter. Nobody who asks ‘what are you?’ is doing that. – the people meaning it as a neutral thing to ask anybody will take an answer of [particular town/city/state], of course, and not keep going on about ‘where are you really from’.
TIL. I would have assumed European and probably somewhere in the UK; but if a lot of Chinese people think it sounds Chinese, they presumably know more about what Chinese names sound like than I do.
I assumed that the poster substituted “Magill” for his real last name in that conversation.
Whoops, didn’t think of that. @Maus_Magill?
Uh, yeah. On the old board, I would have included > and < tags, but Discourse made the word disappear. My real name is unique enough that I decline to use it publicly. And Merven Mephistopheles are not my real middle names, but the real names are even more WASPy then you would think possible.
Ah, I see.
I tend to use [lastname] or something similar for that purpose. But I’m not surprised that different people are doing different things.
Sopranos and Breaking Bad are both all-time great series, but Sopranos had a better cast of characters.
I chose to answer it as to what show I enjoyed the most. I haven’t seen Breaking Bad or Ozark so they are out. I loved Sopranos but it got very uneven. I voted for Peaky Blinders because even in inferior last season I very much enjoyed all the actors.
Wow. So, your family came before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (one of the few dates I remember)? I don’t think any of my Asian friends/acquaintances are more than two generations American.
Heh, I had to investigate this. I’ve never known any non-Asian with this surname before. Although I did know an Asian dentist…
The name is actually Nancy.
Yeah, my mother’s family goes way back. My mother’s family is a branch of the Moy Family. Afong Moy was the first documented Chinese woman in America, arriving in New York City in 1834. After enjoying a few years of celebrity, public records of her end in 1850. Some members of my family who are into genealogy are fairly certain we are her descendants, but they’re mostly just guessing; records from the late 1800s are sparse, at best. They can only reliably trace back to about the mid-1870s, so there’s about a 20-25 year gap in the record.
My father’s grandfather was born in China, came to America with his wife, had my grandfather, then he abandoned them and went back to China and started another family there. We have no idea who any of those people are.
I’ve never watched any of those shows. I might be the only one.
No, I’m right there with you.
Nope. – apparently there’s at least three of us.
But in my case, at least, it isn’t those in particular. I usually haven’t seen even quite commonly-watched things.