I come from the Midwest, from the suburbs – growing up hanging out at the mall and looking at the corn fields across the street. I kind of was embarrassed by it for a long time. Then I decided, ‘Hey, if everyone else can embrace their homeland and where they’re from, I can do the same!’
I was made fun of in the Midwest – I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘I want to be white; I don’t want to be this anymore.’ But now I embrace it.
I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.
Wrestling in the Midwest is always such a blast, and a favorite place of mine.
People always want you to look pretty. I would like to live in the Midwest in a small town and never put makeup on. But they won’t let you do that. Once I went through a period when I did do that, wore no makeup, wore my hair any which way, and people looked at me like I was a bum.
I had been blogging for a few years when Jonah Straus, my now-literary agent, reached out to see if I’d consider writing a cookbook. At the time, I didn’t feel ready; I was still getting adjusted to life in the upper Midwest, and I was still finding my recipe voice.
Being in the Midwest, you get the best of all worlds and add your own flavor to it.
I grew up in small towns in Iowa and the Midwest.
The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I’m looking at a run for Senate in 2008, but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.
Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don’t need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can’t afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?
I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven’t lived in a small town since.
Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.
I don’t mean to make a generalization, but I do at the same time, from what I know about people from the Midwest, it seems like their families would talk about money openly in front of them when they were kids. They’d say stuff like, ‘We’re broke! We’re gonna lose the house!’
I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.
I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I’d be burying myself. But I was wrong.
Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic – those are sort of three layers of repression.
