gulab jamun

I've lived most of my life in other people's countries. I was born in a Confucian culture to ex-pat British parents (one Welsh, one English), and apparently learned Chinese before English. I started primary school in a Protestant country and moved a couple of years later to a Mediterranean culture where I was fascinated with little street-side shrines to the Virgin Mary. At nineteen I went to University in Scotland and moved pretty soon after graduation to France. Now I'm a resident alien living in the US.

Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.

But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.

In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.

The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.

I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.

While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).

I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.