City Centers

My first company Arup has an internal company directory. It's basically Arup Facebook where employees share their headshot, professional qualifications, expertise, project experience, as well as personal interests. One field "Proudest Achievement" could be either, and revealed a lot about one's personality. Years later, I still remember my friend's achievement: "High fiving Michael Jordan."

You can search for coworkers by name, or by office. Sitting in the company's largest office, I was often intrigued by the smaller offices around the world, in faraway places. There's an office in Mauritius that had probably 40 people. Mauritius, the island nation off the coast of East Africa with British and French colonial history and possibly the world's most diverse populace. I browsed through the office employee names and saw someone whose name looked a lot like mine. It could have been Christopher Lim or Calvin Liu or Kevin Lee or something. He was definitely Chinese but Mauritian, a Graduate Engineer who had graduated university in the UK. He was a Manchester United and F1 fan. As I stalked read his profile, I couldn't help but feel an incredible sense of connection - I felt from his interests that we had similar personalities, perhaps even similar life experiences despite our wildly different places of birth. I wondered, would I be him if my parents had chosen to move to Mauritius instead of the United States? It suddenly seemed less preposterous a hypothetical. What would that have been like? Here I could see one manifestation of that alternate universe, as a skinny engineer who grew up watching David Beckham, speaking English, French and Chinese (maybe Hakka?), playing Starcraft, and now working at the exact same company as me.

Publicly available photo of Arup Mauritius office

I grew up believing the United States to be the center of the world. I wondered how anyone else could interpret the world any other way. With its geopolitical might and the immigrant melting pot legacy, American exceptionalism is core to our upbringing. Even our immigrant tale is inextricably spun with a sense of superiority, about people finding a better life in this better country. Somehow I was educated with the misbelief that the US was the only country with substantial immigration - in my mind, the other countries were monocultures with little desire or ability to accept immigrants.

I'm not sure when I discarded this myth, but by the time I was working in Hong Kong, my peer group included overseas Chinese from Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Malaysia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Panama, Indonesia, Tanzania and so on. Everyone was well-adjusted, well-educated and often substantially more interesting and multilingual than me.  When I discovered my Mauritian doppelgänger, I had completely detached American-ness with exceptionalism.

So this is actually a post about New York. I know, that was a long walk. But hear me out. My life in Asia re-centered my world. With over 4 billion people, the majority of humanity, living in Asia, how central could America possibly be? Asia and its billions had rewired my ambitions, dreams and definitions of "cool" or "success." 

When I moved back to Boston, I found myself walking past buildings downtown, including the high rise on State Street where my mom worked. As I watched suits dashing by, I couldn't help but think how provincial it all felt. I imagined these people trying to climb the corporate ladder at these downtown offices to get club seats at Fenway Park and a seat at a gala hosted at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It was jarring to realize that I used to want that life.

And then I moved to New York. Having grown up in Boston and gone to college in DC, New York had always loomed large. For so many in my peer group, New York City was their dream. Many of my friends didn't even consider jobs in other cities post-college - many probably didn't even wonder if they'd enjoy living here, they just figured it was the path they should take. Landing a job and moving to New York represented success. But for me now, it just represents this concrete mass with a decrepit subway system and an obsolete class system where a lot of high paying US jobs happen to be based. The city's self-centeredness clashes with my rewired sensibilities, and my peers reeked of default choices.

My mentality in NYC was edgy.  When asked how I was enjoying the city, I wanted to summarize the previous 8 paragraphs. Instead I'd deliver some snippy response meant to establish my cosmopolitan credentials, point out my barbs against the city while minimizing offense at the questioners' invariable New York pride. I was so preoccupied with distinguishing my attitude that I struggled to enjoy the city as it was. I took in the skyscrapers and the street food and those flimsy metro cards as someone else's ideal city, and told myself I was just here for a job. 

*****

I'm not sure exactly when I wrote that. I'm picking this up in a different city, a full two years later. The last few paragraphs don't entirely jibe with how I feel about New York, or how I remember my experience there. I was only 8 months in when Covid-19 shut the city down and my East Village apartment suddenly felt very small. I ended up moving out in the beginning of May, and though I thought I'd be returning, I didn't. 

At some point it became clear that I'd need to start over somewhere, and it wasn't going to be in Asia. At that point, moving back to New York didn't feel like moving back - it felt like starting over. Considering I never fully felt like I vibed there, I instead sought out a place where I did feel some connection. Seattle ended up being the only choice.

Unlike New York, Seattle has no pretenses about being the center of the world. Similar to Boston, it is a small city tucked away in a corner of the country but makes up for the lack of size and geographic centrality with outsized economic and cultural impact