Monday, January 18, 2010

7 Years Ago

True story: Freshmen year of high school, I was working on the dreaded "Western Civ Project." Basically this was a vastly overrated arts and crafts endeavor that had to do something with Western Civilization and provides a great show to the parents and anxiety attacks to the academically-inclined but completely unhandy freshman. I still don't really understand it. But basically I was working the basement of my house, which is a very dirty place where we kinda put things we don't want to deal with. There's all this garbage storage down there, and clearing a table, I knocked off a flat item. It was a mirror and it shattered. I believe that this broken mirror took place in December of 2002. I also believe that it has contributed to 7 years of bad luck, and I think I am finally past that.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Most Diverse Countries in the World

Editor's note: I began writing this post in 2010 and got through countries 10-6. I then got tired and left the piece, partially because it was a more daunting challenge that I was prepared to deliver, and that was that. Somehow this post has received more views than any other in my blog, probably because this is one of the biggest questions people curious about the world have. It's 2015 now and I've seen more of the countries on the list than before and have a much better understanding of their racial dynamics and the forces that created them, be they immigration, colonialism, or refugee migration. The world has also changed in those 5 years and countries have gotten more diverse. So I've actually shuffled the list. I've also realized it's probably possible to evaluate countries quantitatively. But I began this list much less sophisticated and so while I look at data, this is a qualitative approach mainly. So here's to editing this post.

What are the most diverse countries in the world? This has been a question I've been pondering for some time, and I was surprised by the lack of information about this on the internet. Thus, I have decided that even though I am completely unqualified, as usual, I will make this list myself.

The criteria is very tricky as diverse is a difficult term to define, and as I have explained in my post about Uyghurs, race is a socially constructed concept and therefore difficult to analyze in any absolute, scientific sense. But here I am basically looking at countries that have a lot of different cultures, races, and/or languages, both in absolute terms as well as in percentages, in addition to how well blended the different groups are with each other (aka segregation is not rewarded). Furthermore, the more different that these cultures are from each other, or to an impartial outsider, will have a huge factor.

To see what I mean with these factors, let's look at China, a country that did not make my list. The government states that there are 56 minority groups in China, including the Zhuang, Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs and Uzbeks, as well as many you will never have heard of (the Bonan ring a bell?). There are actually probably even more minorities in China, because the government's classification is notoriously inaccurate and Wikipedia lists several "undistinguished minorities." Anyways, there are lots of different races, cultures and languages native to China. However, 92% of the population is Han Chinese, and probably a greater percentage speak Mandarin natively. Furthermore, many of those ethnic groups, while clearly distinct, may appear to outsiders to be Chinese, or at the very least Asian. Anyways, that 92% figure suggests a shockingly homogeneous country, and from personal experience living in Beijing, I did not feel like I was living in a diverse city. If a country's capital metropolis is not diverse, you'd have to assume that you'd be hard-pressed to find diversity anywhere. Now most of these groups have their own area, and so if you go to Urumqi you will see Han and Uyghurs living together, and back in August (2009), fighting against each other. This brings us to Chinese racism, which I felt was pretty prevalent and even institutionalized and thus I would not consider China a country of racial harmony. There are lots of Westerners and other foreigners living in China, but very few of these are citizens - most are there for a non-permanent stay. In China's defense, the Han majority does have a lot of diversity within it, which is obvious to anyone familiar with the cuisines of different provinces. Overall though, Chinese society is pluralistic and expansive, but not multicultural and diverse.

Despite that, large countries do feature strongly in this list. Colonialism is very influential in this list, an unfortunate cause for most of the world's diversity. I recognize the absurdity and pompousness of attempting to rank all the countries in the world and to do a shallow dive into their racial makeup and issues, especially with 4 countries on this list in which I have never set foot....but then again, it's my personal blog. 

10) Papua New Guinea
This country has to make the list because of its 850 indigenous languages and cultures. Not only is this number far more than any other country can boast, but it represents 12% of the Earth's human languages. Most of the groups are Papuan, in my opinion a very understudied large ethnic group, and many others are Polynesian, a more well-known pan-ethnicity and more recent inhabitant of the islands (recent meaning within 4000 years ago, in this context). The country has about 1% foreign born population, your typical mix of Australians, Americans, Brits, Filipinos and Chinese, so it isn't diverse in the sense that many of the countries on this list are. In addition, I don't think most of these 850 groups interact too much together, but I could be wrong. Either way, Papua New Guinea needs a mention because in one criteria, it is absolutely the most heterogeneous political entity mankind has ever known.

9) United Kingdom
I was surprised when I visited Europe how diverse it had become. My initial ignorant American perspective was that everyone there was white and that they would have no idea how to deal with other races. This is blatantly untrue nearly everywhere you go, and can be manifested in the fact that just about every large European city has black people and Chinese restaurants. In fact as my last blog posts in Ireland can attest to, you can find Chinese restaurants in obscure towns in the Irish countryside. True the demographic landscape is changing rapidly across Europe, but still in many European countries, large scale intercontinental immigration is relatively new. These countries have generally been slow to internalize these foreigners, with many countries slow to shed nation-state imagined histories and adopt pluralistic identities. I noticed in Ireland that while being Chinese was not a huge surprise, being a native English speaking Chinese was. Two large exceptions in Europe exist: France and the United Kingdom. I give the nod to the UK here because the country has more groups from a wider geographic range, and because it has had fewer well-publicized incidents of racism (I'm referring to the Burqa affair in France). The UK, and especially London, has significant populations of people from India, Pakistan, China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, and many other West Indies. On the other hand, the country is 85% White British, and 92% White. Of the non-British Whites, the UK has a lot of people from continental Europe, especially from Poland and Scandinavia, as well as from the US, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand (the Anglophone world). Within the White British, I need to add that there is some diversity there too, between the Irish, Scots and Welsh, and Welsh is still a vibrant first language.

A good test I like to do when seeing how well a country has incorporated its immigrants is whether it has any minority celebrities. I can think of Jay Sean, Naomi Campbell, Leona Lewis and Katie Leung off-hand, so the UK passes this test.

8) India
India makes this list in the same vein as Papua New Guinea. The enormous country boasts over two thousand ethnic groups and several hundred languages, including a shocking 29 with over a million native speakers. Perhaps the most impressive thing though, at least to a linguistic nerd like me, is the diversity within these languages. All four major language families are present in India. Indo-European is the big one, which here includes Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, as well as English. Dravidian is also immensely present, in Telegu, Tamil and Kannada and is mainly restricted to this subcontinent. The Munda languages are of the same Austronesian family that includes Cambodian Khmer and Vietnamese. Some Sino-Tibetan languages, the family group that includes Chinese, are also present in India in some random languages that I know nothing about. There is even a language isolate in India called Nihali. I make such a big fuss about language families because they represent vast diversity - languages from different families are essentially completely unrelated, making it much harder to learn languages from different families. The entire continent of Europe is almost exclusively Indo-European with a few rare exceptions - India is arguably more linguistically diverse than Europe. In addition, India has a rich religious history and has significant worshipers of all the major religions, notably Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and Buddhism. Data on ethnic groups in India is not available but from what I can tell, foreign-born population is pretty negligible, at least as a percentage of India's billion-plus.

7) Canada
While doing research for this post, Canada was the country that surprised me the most.  When I think of Canada and the Canadians I know, I generally think of white people, who generally act like marginalized Americans but occasionally say "eh."  However, statistics show that about 20% of the 20 million+ Canadians are "visible minorities."  This includes 4% South Asian, 3.9% Chinese, 2.5% Black and a surprising 3.8% Native American, or as they call it, First Nations. Several Canadian minorities are familiar to the American public, including Russell Peters, Kristen Kreuk, Donovan Bailey and Jim Carrey, who is his own race.  Canada's diversity is best reflected in its cities, especially Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.  One vignette demonstrating this involves my friend Vicki from Vancouver whose parents are from Vietnam, but was raised to speak Cantonese because of the proliferation of that language within Vancouver.  Toronto is perhaps one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and Montreal is legitimately bilingual.  This summer on our family vacation there, I noticed that in addition the diversity that you might find in any Northeast American city, Montreal also had many immigrants from Martinique, Haiti and Algeria, basically Francophone countries whose people you might not meet in many parts of the English-speaking world.

6) United Arab Emirates
The UAE is a difficult country to place.  Unlike most of the countries on this list, the native and politically dominant ethnic group is a minority in the country. It is only 16.5% Emirati with an additional 23% non-Emirati Arab or Persian.  Instead, South Asians make up half the population.  In fact, the extravagant city of Dubai is 51% Indian, 15% Pakistani and 10% Bangladeshi.  Then there's 8% of the nation's population that is other, chiefly Europeans and East Asians. Though I couldn't find the figures, there's reportedly a strong continent of Filipinos, Chinese and Malaysians.  It shouldn't be surprising that the UAE is also very religiously diverse. Perhaps the least Muslim of the Islamic states, the UAE has a large population of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.  However, the country's diversity is reportedly not very well integrated.  The Emirati minority controls the country's oil wealth and the expatriate population not working in the city's financial sector is mainly employed as migrant labor.  Thus one can interpret the UAE as a class-based society with strong racial components attached. Similar dynamics exist in Doha in Qatar or Manama in Bahrain.

5) Australia
Though 90% of the country is of European descent, I would argue that Australia is one of the most diverse countries in the world. A jaunt through Sydney would reveal quarters of Lebanese, Italian, Chinese, Greek, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian life. More than 75% of Australians identify with a heritage outside of Australia, including still active migrations from England and New Zealand. From a British penal colony with a disproportionate amount of Scots and Irish to a massive Southeast/Central European migration post World War II, Australia has always been a country with lots of land and not enough people to fill it. They've actively encouraged immigration for much of their history, although it must be noted an incredibly racist "White Australia" policy was only struck down in 1972. The 2011 census found that 27% of the country is born overseas (1st generation Australians) and another 20% are their offspring (2nd generation Australians). Australia has a very well rounded immigrant pool, with no other nationality or language being second dominant, the way Spanish would be in the US.

Is it more diverse than the UK? I'd have to believe so. The massive migration history would see to that. But if one were unaware of this backdrop, Australia might not seem so diverse. Apparently the Australian Census doesn't count race, asking instead ancestry. It's not really kosher to extrapolate, but if you want to ask "how White is Australia?" the census ancestry numbers and other figures I found would say 85-92%. How about the indigenous community? Including people of mixed race, the Aboriginal Australians make up 2.5% of the country.

4) Mauritius
This island in the Indian Ocean is really isolated and small, but somehow that hasn't hurt its immigration. Technically in Africa, the country is bilingual English and French and in crude colors boasts a white, black, brown and yellow populace.Without any indigenous habitation before the European Age of Discovery, Mauritius luckily lacks a brutal history of native decimation by war or germs. After a brief claiming by the Dutch, the islands were governed by the French for nearly 100 years before being conquered by the British in 1810 after fierce battles for the key Indian Ocean port. The French had imported slaves from Africa and Madagascar who were freed in 1835. As a big plantation economy, the British then imported lots of indentured laborers, as they did so often, from India. After gaining independence in 1968, Mauritius democratically elected a string of Hindu Prime Ministers save one Caucasian of French descent. Despite over two hundred years without French rule, French is still widespread. In fact, it seems nearly everyone is fluent in French, English and Mauritian Creole (French based), and a good chunk in an Indian or Chinese language. Official demographic statistics are not kept by the country, and are probably difficult given that intermarriages have been common for nearly two centuries. Nonetheless, I found estimates for 68% Indo-Mauritian, 28% "Creole" (likely having at least some African ancestry), 3% Chinese, and 2% Caucasian. About 5% speak Bhojpuri as their native language, which is considered a dialect of Hindi in India. The country is also extremely diverse religiously, reporting 48% Hindu, 26% Roman Catholic, 17% Muslim and 6% other Christian among the 1.7 million inhabitants.

3) Malaysia
I originally had Singapore #3 in my list, but I've straight up replaced it with Malaysia in the rewrite, to the horror of my Singaporean roommate. But with my travels since 2010 particularly in this past year, I don't have any choice but to readjust my previously ignorant rankings. While Singapore is also extremely diverse, its situation (and that of Brunei and Indonesia to an extent) is related to that of Malaysia and so I will let this spot speak for all of the former states of Malaya and relegate Singapore to the honorable mention list.

Considering its inclusion in the country's name, it might surprise you to learn that ethnic Malays make up exactly half of the country. 50.1%! Ethnic Chinese make up a quarter of the country, Indians  another 7% with fair amounts of other South Asians from Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh represented as well. I've gone into more in-depth with the diverse Chinese community in Malaysia (http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2015/01/strait-thuggin-it.html). The Indian community is majority South Asian with Tamil the lingua franca, but Punjabis are also in Malaysia in large numbers. The other 17% or so includes ethnic groups related to Malays but consider themselves distinct, and many, many groups indigenous to the peninsula or islands who are not related to Malays. I thought Malaysia was diverse enough when I'd visited Kuala Lumpur, but when I visited East Malaysia, I realized I'd only scratched the surface. East Malaysia is much less ethnically Malay, with many groups collectively called Orang Asli. I don't know the intricacies of theese groups and won't embarrass myself trying, but just in Kota Kinabalu I ran into many Kadazan and Iban people. Furthermore I've met many Malays with a mixed heritage, seemingly to a larger extent than one sees in Indian and Chinese diaspora communities worldwide. And while sure there are ethnic enclaves in places, and cities like Penang (and Singapore) are overwhelmingly Chinese, my experience in Malaysia has been that there is a ton of true diversity. There are lots of people getting along with each other in English and Malay and learning bits of each other's ancestral cultures, while retaining their own. This is counter to the experience typical of western countries, where immigrant languages disappear over a generation or two. Nonetheless, the government is still Malay-dominated, often making discriminatory social and religious policies. Many of Malaysia's wealthy class are Indian and Chinese, which sometimes leads to ethnic tensions. Malaysia has a long way to go in racial harmony, for sure, but the sheer diversity of its population helps a lot.

2) Brazil
The only Lusophone country in South America has probably seen the most racial mixing to the extent that race discussions in Brazil are simply different. It doesn't make any sense to view things in the same lens that you would anywhere I've ever lived. Four continents are needed to trace the ancestry of most of the 200 million Brazilians have. Amerinidians have inhabited Brazil since 9000 B.C., and there remain tribes in the Amazon uncontacted by outside societies. The Portuguese started coming in the 1500s and brought over lots of African slaves. In fact, 37% of the African slave victims of the transatlantic slave trade ended up in Brazil. Then starting in the late 19th century, large migrations came pouring in from Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, Syria and Lebanon. Now Brazil has the most people of Japanese descent outside of Japan, one of the cities with the largest population of African descent (Salvador). While only 0.4% of Brazilians consider themselves Amerindian, genetic studies estimate that over 30% of the country (60 million) have at least one Amerinidian ancestor. Then there are Pardo Brazilians

1) United States
Of course I would have my home country #1 right? To be honest

Honorable Mentions: Singapore, France, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Turkey, Fiji, Myanmar.









Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Winter Break

Winter Break '09-'10 is quickly coming to a close. Winter Breaks in my experience tend to be pretty slow yet go by fast, if that makes any sense. I've found that there are lots of days where not a whole lot of stuff goes on in, with the wintry cold dissuading lengthy outdoor activities and the lack of the hectic business of college life lending itself to a general apathy towards any achievement. After living in college, home transforms itself into a very different place. Even though we obviously worked at home while in high school, I discovered sophomore year when I brought my final essay back home how hard it can be to work at home. Once you've established this home as a place of rest and relaxation, a place of winter break, it is difficult to change it back into a setting of productivity. Winter break is a time we think we can wake up early, read a lot, work out and do all those things we never got around to during the year. Nevertheless, my time here often deteriorates into mindless late nights surfing that immense internet cesspool of procrastination that is Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia. It takes more mental will to finish one book or learn 100 vocabulary words in another language over winter break than it does to pull out an all-nighter essay during college. Similarly, I'd rather run 10 full field suicides at Ultimate practice than drag my butt out into the sub-freezing weather for a 3 mile run.

Nonetheless, I did try very hard to have a productive winter break, and I did not completely fail. I saw some fantastic movies in theaters (Sherlock Holmes, Avatar, Up in the Air) and some terrible ones at home (2012, Final Destination 4), spent some very quality time with friends, including 2 bar trivia nights, a fantastic ski trip, and a ridiculous new year's party at my house.

About the movies: they're all damn good. I was excited about Sherlock Holmes after seeing the trailer over half a year ago, even though I wasn't a huge fan of the few books that I had read. I mean the problem with redoing a popular character like Holmes is that the qualities that made him popular, namely the writing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, will have nothing to do with this movie. Basically you're just hoping that the writers are able to fashion a strong enough plot and dialogue on their own because the series is not as formulaic as the James Bond series to be easy-to-manufacture blockbusters. But as it turned out, the writers did a really good job and created a Sherlock Holmes who displayed superbly his legendary powers of observation while getting a modern facelift. I thought Robert Downey Jr. did a fantastic job, making his character seem deservedly quirky yet baller.

Avatar is great and seemed to get a lot of press from the user interface mass media, aka twitter and facebook. I was told before it that it was awesome, but that it was basically Pocahontas. Having seen the preview and knowing that it was a futuristic action movie in 3d with blue people, I thought that was a joke. 30 minutes into the film, I was laughing at the similarities. Even the protagonist, Jake Sully, has the same initials as John Smith. My dad remarked that maybe this does take away from the originality of the script, which is so important for Best Picture consideration, but I doubt voters will really give it that much thought. I do think that the analogies to our modern environmental situation and the Bush regime were too obvious, and that the villains were too much like caricatures. Nonetheless, I loved the fight scene at the end which was both creatively designed and stunningly displayed. The whole 3D thing was definitely a cool novelty as well. But yes this is one of those movies you run to see.

Then before heading home, Frank Greg and I went to see Up In the Air. We ran into an RL kid from the class of '09 at the theater and he asked us what we were going to see, and I replied, "Up in the Air." He was really confused and thought we meant we hadn't made up our minds yet. Anyways it was this Clooney-piece that left me with the most to ponder. Basically I believe that George Clooney's character loves a life of complete freedom without any attachments weighing him down, and spends all his time traveling for his job. The movie resonated with me, not that I would ever cut myself off from all my friends like that, but it did remind me why I like traveling. When I was living abroad in '08, I did love the feeling of walking around like an unknown, knowing that I was taking in such different things than the locals, and not being held to the same accountability that I am held to in my own country. It was so very freeing living in a place so far from my home. That feeling was one of my favorite things about living abroad, although perhaps it is a feeling that can only accompany relatively short stays. My other favorite part about studying abroad, besides the whole seeing-and-meeting-new-and-cool-people-and-places, was being automatically considered interesting because I was a foreigner. It was a blessing and a curse, and a lot of people would prefer not to stand out like that, but it really appealed to me.


Anyways those were some random thoughts. I also splurged for myself and bought a book of Top 10 lists, cause I love lists and trivia. It's going to inspire me to make some of my own top 10 lists on this blog, including a top 10 Georgetown basketball games in my career, which I am already so excited about. The UConn game I came back early for is going to be high up there.