Andrew:

I don’t know how you feel about this, but the older I get, the more I come

to think that the British are a very peculiar people indeed.

“Insular” simply doesn’t cover it. I have lived as an expat in China, and

in the USA. In both countries I have found myself at expat-Brit gatherings

where the main entertainment was a long sniggering collective critique of

the weird & fantastic customs of the natives, that critique conducted in exactly the same terms in both places.

I deduce that culturally, the distance between the British and the Americans

is the same as between the British and the Chinese — which, since two

nations further apart & with more different histories than Britain and China

can hardly be imagined, probably implies that the Brits are at some similar

cultural distance from _every other nation_.

This agrees with my wife’s experience. Leaving China for the first time in

her life at age 24 to settle in the USA, she soon got the hang of things.

Our year of living in the UK, by contrast, was disturbing and upsetting to

her. The only cultural connection she could make was to the “broad” style

of British humor, which indeed closely resembles Chinese humor. (The TV

Britcom “Are You Being Served?” was a great favorite.) To this day, if you

ask her about Britain, she will reply: “Not a country for foreigners.”

Perhaps it’s something to do with being an island nation. I have heard old

Asia hands refer to the Japanese as “the British of Asia.” Yes: the Brits

are as peculiar and one-off as the Japanese. Time and again, in my years as

a young Brit roaming the world rather aimlessly, I found myself thinking, of

some nation or other: “Boy, these people have a long way to go! But why do

they hate us Brits so much? And why don’t I care?”