As an American expatriate I'm always shocked or bemused by the US-centric comments I get from family.

I live in East Asia, which is by no measure a cultural or technological backwater, and was surprised to hear my mother say, two days ago, "you must get YouTube over there...".

For some more perspective, I'm the most successful member of my family (from a financial pov) and from the condo I live in to the car I drive, I have nicer things than my parents ever did. I'm the first in the family -- and this is something I only considered just now -- to sends his kids to a good / expensive private school.

Though I don't lord it over them, my life is way more advanced / cushy than theirs. But from their point of view I'm not in the US and therefore don't have access to what they consider the gold standard of civilization.

And this point of view has not changed even though my parents have experienced my life in Asia first hand. Truly bizarre blind spot.

When I first moved to China ~10 years ago, I mentioned to whomever I was on the phone with back home that I needed to go grab some cash and that I might lose the call when I got in the lift. They asked where I planned to get money in the middle of the night, and were surprised to learn that ATM technology had indeed made it to "the Orient."

These days most people just ask if I've eaten a dog.

Guess there's a time lag. I was in China 35 years ago when they didn't have ATMs or anything like that and the west did. Times change.

I obviously wasn't around back then, but even today the pace of modernization in China is astounding; I can only imagine what it must've been like in Deng Xiaoping's later years.

I usually cut them slack unless they're jerks about it. A lot haven't even got a passport. That's usually fine as well: The USA is a big place. Not even talking just actual size. There are a lot of people with diverse ways of living and circumstances. But the place is so physically huge you could spend your entire life exploring it and still not run out of places to find new things and people to see and meet.

If it helps, think of every US state as if it was a european country. You might lazily think they are all the same but scratch the surface and there's a lot of difference.

So yeah, its fine for someone to say they're from California. You already know they're from the land of High Fructose Corn Syrup so why be nasty about it?

It really isn't so diverse though. Same language, same retail and restaurant chains, same cars, same TV channels, same currency, same political system, same sides in war back to 1800s (and even that is a large portion of remembered history).

Compare it to Europe, where a 3 hour drive gives you different food, language, holidays, religion, festivals, type of beer, different political system, different history going back 1000+ years... and another 3 hour drive does it all over again.

But still, I think it’s easy to cut murricans some slack. Their country IS one of the most interesting ones. If I weren’t living in my dream country I think I’d want to live in California.