Babi Pangang is a Dutch institution — sweet roasted pork with a thick red sauce, served for decades in Chinese-Indonesian restaurants across the country. It was created here, by people who arrived with nothing and adapted everything to survive. When Julie Ng’s documentary Meer dan Babi Pangang explored that story, I found myself in it. So did a lot of people who thought they had nothing in common with a Chinese restaurant family in the Netherlands.

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Café Solo was new to me, but Delfshaven wasn’t. I used to live here. André still does, now with Afif. I know these streets, this harbour, the particular light on the water in the afternoon. I’ve walked past the spot where the Pilgrim Fathers departed in 1620 more times than I can count, on my way to somewhere else, barely registering it.

You stop seeing what you live inside of.

Café Solo turned out to be exactly right — amazing coffee, broodjes Rendang, kleine kroketjes, and a banana bread without sugar that had no right being that delicious. Three men settling into a terrace on a Friday afternoon. Afif was saying what needed to be said about the Dutch. He was right. He is almost always right about this.

And there we were. A Surinamese, a Malaysian, and a walking archive of European and Ottoman history, sitting in the harbour from which Europeans set sail to colonize someone else’s world, eating Rendang on bread, talking about self-righteousness.

We didn’t plan the irony. We just picked a good café.

I let Afif finish. Then I said: me too.

He didn’t understand at first. André did, because André is old enough to have watched himself long enough. But Afif is still in the phase where the anger is clean. I remember that phase. It feels like clarity. It feels like finally seeing. And it is — but it’s not the last thing you see.

What you see later, if you’re honest, is yourself doing the same thing in a different costume.

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I grew up in Rotterdam knowing I had to be better. Not good. Better. Better than the standard, which was never stated but always clear. I dressed it up as ambition. As pride. As my mother’s son. And it was all of those things. It was also shame wearing a blazer.

The Dutch didn’t invent self-righteousness. They just industrialized it — built it into the infrastructure, literally. In Cape Town there are bike lanes that turn from bright green to faded white lines exactly where the township begins. The city didn’t decide to be racist that Tuesday. It just maintained what was already there and called it neutral.

We do the same thing inside our heads.

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Between 1913 and 1916, forty thousand people were removed from the cities around the Panama Canal. The official story was flooding. Natural, inevitable, nobody’s fault. It took until 2019 for a historian to name it as ethnic cleansing. In the meantime, people went diving to look for the drowned cities, posting Instagram photos of what they thought was nature’s work.

The story wasn’t erased. It was replaced with a cleaner one.

That’s what colonialism actually exported. Not just administration and religion and English. It exported the habit of replacement — of taking the complicated, bloody, self-interested truth and smoothing it into something that doesn’t keep you up at night.

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Yaya DaCosta, speaking on the One54 Africa podcast, calls it speaking white. She means English, but she means more than English. She means the internal standard. The voice that tells you whether you’re credible, articulate, worth listening to. Most of us — and I mean most of the world — run that voice in a language and a register we inherited from people who took something from us first.

Even this essay is written in that voice. I know that. I’m writing it anyway.

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Then I watched Julie Ng’s documentary Meer dan Babi Pangang. A second-generation Chinese woman tracing the history of a dish that isn’t even Chinese. It was invented in the Netherlands, for Dutch palates, by Chinese families who had arrived with nothing and needed to survive. Fathers and mothers working day and night. Children who felt ashamed in school, who flinched at their parents’ accents, who wanted to disappear into Dutchness and couldn’t quite manage it.

She didn’t find herself in the Netherlands. She had to leave first.

She went to Hong Kong, where her mother lives now. Then to her father’s village in China. And there, in a place she had never lived, doing rituals she had never been taught, standing next to a father she had spent her whole Dutch life not quite being able to reach — something settled.

Not answers. Not resolution. Something older than both.

At the end her father said: it’s just survival. Not heroism. Not a lesson. Not a foundation myth. Just people doing what people do when they have no other choice.

You have to live it. Witness it. Carry it in your body long enough. And then one day, in a village, doing something your hands don’t fully understand, you know who you are. Not because someone told you. Because you were finally present for your own life long enough to feel it.

The story of every ethnic minority is the same story. Different dish. Different language. Different port of arrival. Same mechanism.

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Now look at our table again.

A Surinamese, a Malaysian, and a walking archive of European and Ottoman history. Between us we carry centuries of colonialism, displacement, and survival.

And we spoke English to each other.

I always told myself this was cosmopolitan. Worldly. A sign of being beyond borders. But sitting with it now I see it differently. English was simply the most successful colonialism, so pervasive we stopped noticing it had won. We weren’t beyond borders. We were inside the largest border ever built — one with no walls, just a language everyone agreed to perform.

In Star Trek there is a universal translator. It always struck me as elegant science fiction — each person speaking from their own center, in their own tongue, and being genuinely understood. No performance required. No costume. Just presence.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to reach toward that. Imperfectly, clumsily, but directionally. For the first time in human history there is a technology that doesn’t require you to become someone else to be heard. That’s not a small thing. It shows, by contrast, how profound the loss has been — that we needed to invent a machine to do what human societies never managed on their own terms.

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But here is what all these stories keep showing me, underneath the anger and the shame and the awareness:

The colonizers were often colonized themselves.

This is not an excuse. It is a longer view. The Portuguese who arrived in West Africa had been shaped by Moorish occupation. The Dutch who built their empire were themselves a people who had fought for survival against Spanish dominance. The British, the French, the Belgians — all of them carrying older wounds they never fully processed, passing the mechanism forward, dressing it in new flags.

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And then there is the example nobody wants to say out loud.

What has been done to Jewish people in the twentieth century is documented, undeniable, and horrific. What Israel is doing on the world stage right now is also documented, undeniable, and horrific. The wound and the weapon are not the same thing. But the mechanism connecting them is.

The pattern doesn’t care whose turn it is.

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Afif eventually saw my point. Not because I persuaded him — his anger stands, it’s correct — but because he’s sharp enough to follow an argument to where it gets uncomfortable.

Three men on a terrace in Delfshaven. Between us: colonial histories we didn’t choose, languages we didn’t invent, the particular self-satisfaction of men who consider themselves aware, and the Pilgrim Fathers’ harbour at our backs.

We didn’t plan the irony. But there it was, in the sun, with the kroketjes.

Awareness is just awareness. Nothing more, nothing less. The emotions still come afterward. The judgment follows the emotion. Knowing this doesn’t stop any of it. It just means you’re watching when it happens.

That’s not wisdom. It’s not a conclusion.

It’s just where I am today, on a morning in May, trying to write it down before the costume goes back on.