Small Talk.
(aired on All Things Considered July 14, 2003)

 

I've lived in three places in the last three years. In San Francisco, people asked about neighborhoods. In Washington, DC, they asked about jobs. At medical school in Boston, where I am now, people ask: "So where'd you do your undergrad?" I hate this question.

It's not that I'm not proud of my alma mater. At UC Santa Cruz, I liked my community of film students, I liked that we didn't have grades and I liked taking all kinds of classes, from anthropology to architecture to African history. At San Francisco State, where I took science classes to prepare for medical school, I loved the diversity of the students and all the older students, like me, with complicated histories and big dreams. But if I'd gone to different schools, would anything truly important about me be different? I don't think so.

I try to remember that the people asking me where I did undergrad are mostly young. They've spent their lives in school. Recently, someone I met asked me the question. I answered politely, but pointedly did not return the same question. I assumed he was playing some evil status game. Afterwards, I complained about it to our mutual friend who said, "No, no. He's chill. He went to UMass," a school that isn't anymore New York Times wedding pages than mine. I think he was really asking: "Where have you been? What was your life like?" and to him, that meant school.

In San Francisco, where I lived for many years, I liked the local small talk question: "What neighborhood do you live in?" San Francisco's neighborhoods are proudly distinct, politically and aesthetically. So I thought the answer told me something. I admit I judged people this way. And if I liked the answer, it led to conversation about dim sum or burritos--things that mattered.

In Washington, DC, where I lived for a year, the small talk question was:"Where do you work?" In San Francisco, we avoided this question until we got more intimate, especially if we might be talking to a writer who worked as a waiter or a filmmaker who worked as a temp. So when I moved to DC, I thought the small talk was intrusive and shallow. But my circles in DC were full of people like me who had moved to there for work. Our lives were defined by work, so people asked about jobs.

My parents grew up in Kansas. They like to joke about the small talk questions folks ask there, which were often about the weather, stuff like:"Hot enough for you?" which is barely even a question at all. These questions can seem, frankly, sort of stupid to people on the coasts. To give Midwesterners their due, though, I think what questions like this really mean is, "Well, you seem like a nice person, but it'd be rude to just start asking you about yourself." I think most Midwesterners don't like to get all personal right away.

If that's true, my favorite small talk question was the anti-Midwestern question. It wasn't small talk at all. At the beginning of the year, a classmate introduced herself. After getting my name, she looked at me carefully, paused, then asked: "So: what's your story?"

 

copyright 2003 joe wright