"Philly, Mostly"

How I learned to answer “Where are you from?”

An Uber driver taking me to Philadelphia International Airport asked me “where’s home?”

“Philly,” I replied, turning down the volume of my music to engage in what would hopefully be just a brief conversation. I was confused by the question; he had just picked me up at my Pennsport apartment.

“No, I mean, are you from here,” he emphasized.

“Yeah,” I replied, my voice upswinging.

I saw his eyes from the rearview mirror.

“I’ve lived here since 2007,” I said. “Lived in South Philly for about 7 years. Brewerytown for one ye—

“There’s no such thing as Brewerytown,” he laughed.

“No, well, I know that but…”

“Were you born and raised in Philly?”

“South Jersey,” I conceded.

A few seconds passed before we both started laughing.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, filling in the blanks so neither of us had to say the word gentrification.

When I did cop to being from New Jersey, it always had to be “South Jersey,” distinguishable from my North Jersey counterparts. And while people can’t always locate my hometown of Voorhees, they do usually know the neighboring Cherry Hill…except Cherry Hill felt like a lie.

My sister, living in my “other” city of Atlanta, always introduced me to her students and colleagues as her “brother from New Jersey,” which bothered me because I had already claimed Philly for myself. It was my physical location at the time, and the place where I had learned most about myself in my post-adolescent years. She could be the Jersey Girl. I was a city guy.

Of course, no one has the right to tell a person where “home” is located, and there are multiple understandings of the concept of “home,” be it place, person, or time-bound. Though my lived experiences feel most aligned to Philly as my home, I often would tell friends I was going “home” for the holidays in reference to my parents’ house in Voorhees. When I moved to Panama, “home” became Philly - except for when I visited the city during break, in which home flipped back to Panama City. The adage “home is where the heart is” really meant “home is where I last lived - seen through rose colored glasses.”

Many people have asked me why I moved out of the United States, and the answer lies somewhere between curiosity and a mild existential crisis. I had already traveled to 30-some odd countries and always wanted to test the international school market. My first time living abroad was also the first time I left the country. I was a primary school English teacher for 4th grade in Yaoundé, Cameroon back in 2010. To say it was a formative experience would undercut its impact on me. Upon arrival, I felt I had quickly made a mistake. My Google search showed me functional but well-designed government buildings and paved roads, not the streetside fires, rusted-colored roads, and high-sulfur diesel that had overwhelmed me upon my visit. During my first evening, I learned of the ubiquity of cockroaches. Months later, I would awaken to the feeling of one resting on my cheek as if I were its bed.

I had to ride on the back of a motorbike to school by drivers that barely looked 15. When I first hopped on, I asked my Director where my helmet was. She laughed. “No, dear.” I was terrified as we sped over hills, slammed our breaks behind trucks, and seemingly narrowly avoided collisions with pedestrians.

Living in Yaoundé also required me to re-closet myself at a time when I probably needed someone to find LGBTQ+ community (and I wouldn’t get even that for about ten more years). It was a place where I feigned being Christian just for the sake of efficiency. Imagine my surprise when the Church asked me to stand up and introduce myself to what must have been 200 congregants. The identity I thought I packed with me had been left at the terminal - partly out of protection, partly out of naivety, and definitely out of ignorance. How could Yaoundé become home?

During my second week of school, I chose to walk the two mile road with some of the school kids. A five-foot long black snake darted across the road in front of us. I instinctively spread my arms. “Attention!” I yelled in French, but the children behind me grabbed small branches and chased the snake into the bushes with what can only be described as absolute glee. But soon, the culture shock turned intrigue moved from frustration to adjustment and, towards the end, acceptance. I didn’t mind being called “le blanc” by a man across the street. I enjoyed buying bananas in the morning from the fruit vendor, eating bread with Tartina on the way to school, eating whole fish on the side of the road, and finishing my day with beignets. While the students spent more time befuddled by my arm hair than becoming fluent in English, I enjoyed reading to them, teaching them the English equivalent to animals that lived in their country, and improving my French. I adjusted. The motorbike commute would become one of my favorite moments of the day. I could watch the sprawling layers of shades of green without having to pay attention to the road in front of me.

If Cameroon forced me to camouflage parts of myself, a trip to Israel five years later made me confront a version of identity that didn’t quite fit either. I went there with the hope that I would connect more with my Jewish roots. Maybe that was the “home” I was missing. The trip tested me spiritually in all the right ways, but also ethically. I admit it felt incredible to exist in a space where a part of my identity wasn’t in the minority - where it was commonplace, boring even, to be Jewish. Even as an unobservant Jew, I volunteered to be adorned with tefillin by Orthodox men outside the Kotel. I prayed there. I felt awed by the magnanimity of Masada. I experienced a sort of calm in the blue city of Tzvat. I danced in Tel Aviv. And like many others, I swam in the Dead Sea only to feel rather ambivalent about the whole thing.

One night, in a hotel not far from a Kibbutz, an air raid siren jolted my nerves. I remember knocking on the bathroom door while my Israeli roommate showered.

“Um, should we be going somewhere?” I asked. My voice was shaking as if I had frostbite.

“Nah,” he replied - and so nonchalantly. I remember steam trickling from the shower into the hotel room. I learned that Israel could always become home, if I wanted it to be. Whether it should was harder to reconcile. And what a privilege - one that serves as a substantial theme in my upcoming novel.

Twenty years after Cameroon, I find myself in yet another country trying to mediate the elements of myself with different cultural (and political) norms, while building a new community, with batshit traffic patterns, and the occasional odd creature or two. It’s nowhere near as drastic a change from the United States as Cameroon, yet I have found similar ways in which I have performed variations of myself that don’t always quite fit. The difference is, now I am prepared to own them or, at the very least, forgive them.

Well, sometimes. There is a long running joke amongst my colleagues from Pennsylvania that I do not claim the state. Just Philly, mostly.

I have had multiple Uber drivers here ask me a version of the same question. “¿De dónde eres?” Where are you from? How long are you staying? Do you like Panama?

I answered the way I’ve learned to answer, depending on what feels easier at the moment. Philly, most of the time. Sometimes I add New Jersey - especially if a friend is with me to call me out. Sometimes just “the U.S., but Panama, now.”

They will usually nod, tell me about the time they visited Miami or New York City. They understand home, even though I’m not sure I always do.

One driver kept glancing at me through the rearview mirror, waiting, I think, for me to elaborate on home.

I’d like to have given him one definition. To trace my own version of home - the friends I missed, my endearing but wacky family, the dog I left with an ex but still said goodnight to from afar (don’t judge me). I wondered if I even knew the Spanish for “coming of age.”

But instead I just looked out the window at the 70s style buildings in need of a powerwash and a city that still feels new in some ways and strangely familiar in others - the same kind of heat I knew from Philly summers, the same kind of noise of Center City, the same small routines starting to take shape.

So I realize that the question isn’t meant to be answered cleanly. Maybe “home” isn’t something you need to prove or defend or trace back to a single point on a map. Maybe it’s not the place you were born or spent your development of your years. It may not even be the place where you’ve left most of your loved ones. Maybe it’s as many cities and towns as you can name. Or maybe it’s learning to make the most of the one thing you carry with you everywhere…yourself

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