The Question

There is a question I never know how to answer properly:

“Where are you from?”

It sounds simple. A small-talk question. A way to place someone on the map.

But for me, it has never felt casual.

Sometimes it comes after someone has already spoken to you for a while, formed an impression, and now wants a country to attach that impression to. Other times, it comes at the beginning of a conversation, as if the answer will decide where the conversation can go: politics, beliefs, interests, assumptions, familiarity, distance.

I do not find the question difficult because I do not know my background, and not because I am ashamed of it. I find it difficult because I never felt like I belonged to only one place.

I was raised in the UAE. My roots are Palestinian. And for a long time, the place I felt most emotionally connected to was Syria.

So when someone asks me where I am from, I already know that one answer will leave something out.

The First Answer

My first instinct is usually to say Syria.

Sometimes I wonder whether saying Syria makes me sound less Palestinian, or ungrateful, or not proud enough of where my family comes from. But that is not really it.

Syria was where my extended family lived. It was where we spent summers. It was where family gatherings happened, where I saw cousins, where I had memories that were not built from stories only, but from actual visits, streets, people, food, and routines. Later, it was also where I studied, made friends, and lived part of my young adult life.

So when I say Syria, I am not trying to erase Palestine. I am answering from memory.

The Place I Could Not Access

Palestine existed differently.

Our life in the UAE was more practical than daily discussions of a national cause. It was about education, stability, work, family, and trying to build a safe life while being far from our extended family, who were themselves Palestinian but living in Syria because they had lost Palestine in 1948.

So Palestine was present, but it was not present as a place we could visit, or a place we were planning to return to, or even a place that was practically available to us. It existed through history, identity, and belonging, but not through access.

We had Syrian travel documents. Palestine was never spoken of as a realistic option in the sentence, “If we ever leave this country, we will settle there.”

That place was always Syria.

When Syria Changed

Then Syria changed.

War does not only destroy the place where it happens. It also destroys the imagined place people keep in their minds as a backup, a return, or an emotional anchor.

For many people like us, Syria was not only a country on the map. It was the place that held the family network. It was the place that made the word “extended family” feel real. It was the place that made our Palestinian history less abstract because it gave our family a physical setting after displacement.

When Syria became unstable, something inside that whole map changed.

The place that was supposed to be the answer became another question.

The Place That Held Us

For a long time, my relationship with the UAE felt practical.

I lived here. I studied here. I worked here. My daily life was here. But I was also constantly aware that we were expats. The system reminded us of that, and our parents reminded us of that too, not with bitterness, but with realism.

We were here, but we were not from here. We were building a life, but we also had to remember that this life depended on permission, employment, documents, and rules.

So I did not immediately think of the UAE as belonging. I thought of it as stability.

But sometimes stability becomes personal before you realize it.

During a moment of political tension around the UAE, I felt anger in a way I did not expect. At first, I wondered whether it was fear. Maybe I was afraid of losing the only stable place left to us. Palestine was not practically available. Syria had changed. The UAE was the place where our life had continued.

But the feeling was not only fear.

It was also loyalty. Gratitude. Recognition.

I realized that the UAE was not only the place where we had residence, work, safety, and routine. It was the place that had held our life together. It gave us stability when Palestine could not provide it, and when Syria could no longer provide it. It became the place where we studied, worked, grew, and tried to build something.

That does not cancel Palestine. It does not cancel Syria. It does not simplify the story. It adds another layer to it.

The Problem with Labels

Maybe that is what I have been thinking about lately: how many lives cannot be explained through one label.

We like labels because they help us organize the world. Palestinian. Syrian. Expat. Refugee. Migrant. Resident. Citizen. Displaced person. Case study. Demographic group.

In social sciences, these categories matter. I teach some of them. We talk about migration, population change, identity, development, social stability, and the reasons why social development goals exist in the first place. We study how political instability, natural disasters, economic crises, and conflict can disrupt people’s lives. We discuss displacement, family separation, education gaps, healthcare access, inequality, and the movement of people across borders.

All of that matters. We need these frameworks to understand the world. Without them, suffering remains scattered and hard to respond to. Data helps governments plan. It helps societies see patterns. It helps us understand the scale of a problem, not just one emotional story inside it.

But there is also a danger in stopping there.

Because nobody lives as a demographic change. Nobody wakes up as a migration pattern. Nobody experiences their own life as a case study.

The Life Inside the Category

That thought came back to me while reading As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow. I do not want to turn this into a book review, because what stayed with me was not only the plot. It was the way the novel brings the human details back into the bigger picture.

We might see numbers, patterns, refugee figures, displacement, immigration, humanitarian cases, and development challenges. But the people behind those categories are not experiencing themselves that way.

They experience a love story interrupted. A family separated. A knafeh recipe promised for later, only if they make it somewhere safer. A bag of official documents carried across a border. A lemon held against nausea at sea.

That is what stories can do. They do not replace data, and they should not. But they remind us that data is always pointing to lives that are more layered than the terms we use to describe them.

What People Carry

There is another thought the novel brought back to me, and maybe I had already been carrying it before I read it.

When people lose access to a country, they do not only lose land. They also face the fear that the place itself will disappear from the future. That it will become a memory, a file, a political issue, or something spoken of only in the past tense.

But maybe a country is not carried only by borders. Maybe it is also carried by the people who leave it, and by what they do with the life that continues afterward.

This does not make displacement beautiful, and it does not make loss acceptable. But it means loss is not the same as erasure.

People carry places through language, food, memory, work, art, children, friendships, and the way they affect others. A person can leave a country and still carry something of it into every room they enter.

That is why one idea in the novel stayed with me: the thought that if people leave, they can still become a continuation of the place. Not instead of the country, and not as a replacement for return, but as proof that a place can survive through the people who refuse to let it end inside them.

I think this is also why the idea of Palestine has changed for me over time. At some point, I remember feeling anger while reading about Palestine, thinking: why did they take our land? But then another thought came to me. If I believe the land is only something that was taken, then maybe I allow the loss to become the whole story. But if I believe that something of that place exists within its people, then its meaning can still move through the world.

Not as a slogan or a replacement for justice. But through achievement, memory, influence, and the impact people leave wherever they go.

No Single Answer

My own life, although not the same story as the novel, has always existed between categories that do not fully explain it.

Palestinian by origin. Syrian by memory. Raised in the UAE. An expat, but not only an expat. Attached to a country I was always told was not technically mine, and still unable to deny that it protected my life in ways that became deeply personal.

So when someone asks, “Where are you from?” I still do not know how to answer without reducing something.

If I say Palestine, I give the historical answer, but not the full emotional map.

If I say Syria, I give the answer of memory, family, and early belonging, but not the original wound that made Syria part of our story in the first place.

If I say the UAE, I give the answer of lived stability, gratitude, and daily life, but not the legal or ancestral answer people usually expect.

All of these answers are true. None of them is complete.

Human lives do not fit neatly into the categories we use for them. The categories may be useful, but they are never the whole person. They can explain origin, movement, status, and social patterns, but they cannot fully explain attachment. They cannot measure what it means to belong to a place through memory, to another through ancestry, and to another through the life it allowed you to build.

So maybe the better answer to “Where are you from?” is not always one country.

Sometimes the honest answer is a history. Sometimes it is a family route. Sometimes it is a place you lost, a place you inherited, a place you remember, and a place that kept you safe.

And that is what I want to remember, whether I am reading a novel, teaching social sciences, or trying to answer a simple question in a conversation: learn the categories, but do not let the categories become the whole story.