Linguistic Notes

I know I’m a lot more interested in linguistics than just about everyone I know, and I’m brimming with anecdotes that may come off as extremely nerdy.  I'm also aware that this Chinese-intensive post is not relevant to all (both) my readers.  I do hope to impart some of the experiences that I really honestly find awesome, and maybe some of you will find linguistics cooler. Or maybe you’ll just realize I’m an even bigger nerd than you thought.

Background: Hong Kong is largely a trilingual city of English, Cantonese and Mandarin.  I am also trilingual in the same languages, and at a very different rate than the locals. The average local will speak Cantonese natively, understand most Mandarin but speak it by changing their speech in what usually amounts to a poor imitation.  The grasp of English varies widely but is generally pretty limited, especially in speaking ability.

I’m a native English and Cantonese speaker but that doesn’t mean the two languages are equal.  My Cantonese vocabulary was pretty confined to what would be spoken in a family home. I then studied Mandarin in college and lived in Beijing for two summers, where the Mandarin I developed was very utilitarian and colloquial.  The end result was that although the two languages are related, my grasp of Mandarin was actually very different from my grasp of Cantonese, and there was a slew of vocabulary that I only knew in one language and not the other, and would often have to do an awkward triangulation maneuver to figure out what to say.  I have since spent some effort improving my reading and have bridged the gap between the two languages.  Still, since I spent so much of my time speaking Cantonese while illiterate, there are many words which I could say without knowing what that meant.  This happens in English too.  Think about the word “skyscraper.” A student of English can learn that this word refers to very tall buildings – in Chinese this is just 大夏, or big building.  If you never saw the spelling, the word could be spelled scighskreper for all you knew.  You could conceivably understand the concept of a skyscraper, using it correctly in speech, without realizing the imagery in its etymology, a scraper of the sky. This etymology is also entirely self-contained within the English language, as opposed to a word like astrology, where the etymology derives from foreign languages: astra (Latin: star) + logos (Greek: knowledge).

So my Chinese experience has been riddled with these realizations.  The most shocking to me was cha siu 叉烧, the delicious barbecued pork that I’ve loved my whole life.  Never in the first ten thousand times I said this word did I realize what it literally meant. I think I even learned to read it in Beijing and knew that the second word siu meant barbecue.  I figured cha was some arcane word for pork.  It wasn’t until one day randomly on Wikipedia that I read that cha actually meant fork.  That is also a word I’ve said countless times, like in 刀叉 (knife and fork), but I guess I rarely had to read it.  Turns out cha siu is made by roasting the pork on a large two pronged fork. I had probably eaten several bushels of it without realizing the etymology of my food.  It literally means barbecued on a fork, or for short, barbecued fork. 

Last week I went around looking for a place to rent.  I came across glass rooms on the ground level with lots of pictures of rooms and numbers on them and lots of Chinese characters.  I didn’t understand what everything meant – some numbers were square feet measurements, others rental prices, others sale prices, others I still don’t know – but I knew that I could go inside and talk to people who’d get me closer to my goal of residency.  Once I stopped to actually look at the signs.  I saw this word: 租. Then a strange process went through my head.  I figured it was pronounced “zho” (rhyming with foe). Why did I figure that? I had seen the word before and knew it was pronounced zu in Mandarin. I’m familiar enough with the sound changes between Mandarin and Cantonese to know that there’s a good chance that word would be pronounced “zho” in Cantonese, which is incidentally the same pronunciation for the word for rent.  It would make sense that this word meant “rent.” But why did I recognize that character? I suddenly realized I had seen it on taxi stands in Beijing, where taxis are called 出租车 chuzu che. I had first learned the pronunciation of that word out of necessity, and already recognizing chu (go out) and che (car) I figured out what that sign meant when I saw it. So I had also said taxi countless times without realizing what it meant.  Then I thought about it and realized that in mainland China, taxi literally means “for-rent car.” Ahhhhhhhhhh. I felt like I had been given different pieces in two languages and just connected them to solve the bilingual puzzle.  Incidentally, taxi’s are called 的司 dik si in Hong Kong, a transliteration of the English taxi.

Also while renting, I was exposed to formal numbers. Numbers are among the simplest characters to write. Here’s 1, 2, 3: 一二三. However, since they are so simple, in formal contexts, generally monetary ones, separate characters are used. This way a check amount cannot be easily modified. These formal numeral characters are pretty obscure and my relatives that lived here didn’t even know how to write them. When I signed my lease, the amount of my monthly rent was formally written – thus I nervously signed off on a figure that I couldn’t read.  Luckily I could still tell the number of digits in the amount, and since the first two digits were different, I knew that the maximum amount the number could be was 9,800, which was precisely my rental amount.  So I knew I couldn’t be cheated.

Tsim Sa Tsui is a pretty happening place at the southern tip of Kowloon. I know where it is, some of what’s there, how to pronounce it in Cantonese and English but I never thought about what it meant.  Then I was reading its name on the subway and realized that Sa means sand, and Tsui means mouth. I didn’t recognize the character for Tsim but I surmised that it meant sharp because I knew that word had the same sound. So Tsim Sa Tsui literally meant sharp sandy mouth, which made sense because it was a point at the south of the land that jutted into the harbor.  Then I looked at the character for Tsim. (jian in Mandarin).  It is 尖，which I realized was the character for small on top of the character for big.  So the character depicted something that was small on top and bigger on the bottom, or essentially anything sharp.  And that reasoning is pretty sharp.

Also here’s my tips for reading characters without memorizing 10,000 of them: Learn the basic ones, then when you recognize the character as part of a larger character (on the right side), then pronounce it the same as that word but in a different tone.  Or maybe change the initial consonant sound. I’ve been using this for a few years now and I can fake my literacy level pretty well.

I always mix up Australia and Europe in Chinese.  In Cantonese, Australia is ngou zhouw, Europe is ao zhouw.  In Mandarin, Australia is ao zhou, Europe is ou zhou.  Basically they are the opposite of each other, and I never remember which is which. The way I eventually figure it out is by remembering that the first part of Australia is the same as the first part of Macau, which in Mandarin is aomen.

This is the first time outside of the classroom that I have been called by my Chinese name, 李启明. When addressing me in Chinese, my family calls me 明明 Ming Ming, and just about everyone I knew on a first name basis in China called me Cal or Chris.  Here in transactions, people ask not what your name is by how they should address you.  To this I say my last name is Lee and they call me 李先生, or Mr. Lee. In Beijing, I was interested in seeing what my landlord the second time around would call me, as he didn’t speak any English and invited me over for dinner.  To my surprise he never asked for my name and instead called me 小李, or Little Lee.  Here people have addressed me by my full name as well as 李先生, and I’ve seen Lee Christopher Alan on official documents (because the surname comes first in Chinese). Hearing this name being used seems a little surreal, as if by answering to it I’m adopting another identity.  Also surreal is hearing 李先生 in Cantonese because that was previously an address that I had only ever heard used to refer to my father.

A very good indicator variable for whether I know a country's name in Chinese is whether it was in the 2010 World Cup...

Today it really clicked on me that the word for thank you, ng goi, is also used to say "excuse me" when you want someone to get out of the way or get their attention.  Shocking that I never really understood that, and I still don't fully understand it.  Anyways I'm definitely learning every day and at a really good point in my language process, where I'm improving and it's not frustrating.  I've come to really like learning languages and getting a thrill when understanding a word for the first time, and I think I may scratch an itch for another language in the future.

A Whole New World / Hong Kong 101

Hey it's my first post in Hong Kong, a full week into my time here.  It's been a whirlwind month, one that's taken me from the comforts of Washington DC all the way to Hong Kong via Boston and San Francisco, but this past week has been a hurricane at the end of the whirlwind.  I find it odd that when one first arrives in a new city, one has the most tasks to do but is least prepared to do them. So after an initial trip to Disneyland, I've spent this week running around the city looking for housing, filling out work forms, setting up bank accounts, cell phone plans, seeing relatives and getting lost. I needed a local bank account to go to work, needed an address to get a bank account, and thought I could use a loophole to get a cell phone plan without an address and set up my bank account with it.  Turns out I wasn't able to do that but I was able to set up a bank account with proof my US address and my uncle's local address.  I eventually found housing by walking around areas I was interested in and finding real estate agencies on the street, walking in and telling them my price range and needs.  Here was perhaps my biggest culture shock.

The real estate market in Hong Kong is perhaps like no other, and certainly my experience craiglisting apartments in DC did not prepare me for this.  Space is a premium in Hong Kong (more on this later), the 4th most densely populated sovereign territory in the world, and so apartment prices approach and often exceed Manhattan's prices.  A key difference however lies in the more affordable markets.  In the United States, real estate operates by location location location.  A cheap place usually means a small place in a bad neighborhood.  The quality of the place is generally pretty standard.  In Hong Kong it's all about quality - the neighborhoods all tend to be pretty safe, especially by my standards.  Most of the places I saw were in the range of 250-450 square feet and in older buildings.  Older buildings is an important characteristic - structures that are 25-40 years old were built in a different era of Hong Kong, back when it was very much a developing country but already dealing with overcrowding.  The people then were used to a cramped way of life.  It's difficult for me to describe quality here, but you can see it in the material.  Even when the tiles and tables are clean, they look dirty. Many kitchens did not have built in stoves but portable gas or electric ones. One of the bathrooms I went into had a toilet, a hose and a sink - no shower curtains - in a space that wouldn't fit Governor Christie.

I was initially surprised and dismayed by what I found. My apartments in Beijing, despite being in a developing country, were more sizable and of better quality than everything I was seeing.  In addition, my experience in Hong Kong was that it was a first world city, filled with flashy skyscrapers.  Real estate prices in Beijing, though still stingy, are less exorbitant than Hong Kong, and recent growth has led to an influx of new buildings.  Those two factors and a friendly exchange rate all contributed to my comfortable living there.  Eventually I lucked into a one bedroom apartment in a new building on the 27th floor right by the subway in Kowloon, and after talking the price down by nearly $2,000 HKD a month, the place became affordable.  I'm still kinda amazed that I found and rented this place, which is not pictured above.

Anyways in just a week I've realized that my previous impression of Hong Kong had only scratched the elite surface of this city.  Though it had served as a respite from mainland China for me in previous summers, it is much closer to mainland China than I had realized.  English is considerably less widespread than I thought, inequality more so, and the food actually makes me sick.  Anyways I think this is a good time to go into what is Hong Kong for my American friends.


HONG KONG 101 - as requested by Kerry Burke

Hong Kong refers to both an island and a Special Administrated Region of the People's Republic of China.  Located off the southern coast of China, Hong Kong is just south of the Tropic of Cancer and just incredibly humid. Today, October 17th, had a high of 83 and a humidity of around 60%.  It's modern history starts in 1842 when the island of Hong Kong given to the United Kingdom in perpetuity as a result of the First Opium War, which when seen as a war against drugs won by the drug dealers, seems pretty bizarre now.  1898 saw Britain obtain a 99 year lease on a larger swath of territory adjoining Hong Kong on the Chinese mainland.  The ensuing 99 years saw an immense deal of change to the region including the overthrowing of the Qing Dynasty, the end of thousands of years of Chinese dynastic rule, the Republic of China, World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, the rise of the Four Asian Tigers, and the life of Bruce Lee.  As a result when it was all said and done, there was a giant gulf between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong.  The 1997 Handover technically only required the UK to hand over the New Territories that it had obtained in 1898 and not the island of Hong Kong. However authorities figured the island couldn't stand on its own and agreed to return all the territory.  For decades the way this handover would go down was very uncertain, and many people immigrated from Hong Kong for fear of upcoming Communist rule.  Negotiations though resulted in a relatively stable transition that has preserved much of the way of life in Hong Kong.People in Hong Kong have a different system of government, speak a different language, use a different currency, different dialing code, drive on the other side of the road, and have considerably more political freedoms than their mainland counterparts.

About the languages, Hong Kong is primarily a Cantonese speaking area.  In older times, all regions of Chinese had their own dialects, most of them unintelligible with each other. When traveling, people could communicate through a standardized written language and even sign language for numbers. After 1949 when the PRC came into power, they instituted a policy of Mandarin, the dialect of Beijing, as the national language.  Though Chairman Mao himself did not speak Mandarin, it did come to dominate the country.  While they do exist, especially with non-Han minorities, I have yet to meet a PRC citizen who could not communicate in Mandarin.  Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China, was also dominated by a minority of mainlanders retreating from the Civil War, who also mandated Mandarin as a national language.  Though I've heard of elder people who only knew Taiwanese and Japanese, the language of the colonial power at the time, I have also not met a citizen of Taiwan who does not speak Mandarin. However I've met many a Hong Konger who could not speak Mandarin, and even more who spoke it extremely poorly.  It seems that the massive spread of Mandarin pretty much past Hong Kong right by. Cantonese is still widely spoken in the neighboring Guangdong region, as well as by Chinese expat communities in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Canada, the United States and the UK etc.  The written language, as mentioned above, is the same for all Chinese dialects. However standard Chinese writing now closely approximates spoken Mandarin and drifts significantly from spoken Cantonese. Also, the PRC adopted a whole new set of characters which they call simplified characters as opposed to traditional characters.  Maybe half of the characters were changed, and this was the writing which I learned in college. Taiwan and Hong Kong have not adopted simplified characters, and most overseas communities still use traditional.

English is also spoken in Hong Kong, similar to other former British colonies.  While China was closed off from the world between the 50's and 80's, Westerners were much more common in Hong Kong. Just about all signs are bilingual in Chinese and English.  English is taught in all schools though not always well. Most ex-pats don't learn any Chinese, and many that do only learn Mandarin.  About 40% of Hong Kong can speak it proficiently which is often directly tied to class. It is rarely used as a lingua franca between Chinese, making its use very different from that of India.  British English is traditionally in force, with words like lift, car park, colour, and rubbish in vogue. However nowadays America has a stronger influence and American accents probably more common.  Hong Kong strives to become a "Biliterate, Trilingual society" and a fair amount of the population has gotten close.  Most higher paying jobs, including workers at Disneyland, are expected to be trilingual to some extent.

With the help of British investment, the infrastructure of Hong Kong has really been built up.  The most striking features, and my favorite, of Hong Kong are its skyline and transportation.  Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers of any city in the world, and the IFC, Bank of China and Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Building are world famous icons.  The skyline is pretty dazzling, culminating in a ridiculous synchronized coordinated light show.  The subway system, called the MTR, is based off of the London Underground.  However constructed about 100 years later, they learned from previous mistakes and created the incredible system we have today.  A glass plate separates trains from the platforms, preventing people from falling onto the tracks. Trains come super often, 2 minutes apart even during non-peak hours. Octopus cards have served as touch scan, distance calculating check cards since 1997, and also work in buses, taxis, 7-elevens and many other shops.  I know the DC transportation system extremely well and while it's quite good, it just doesn't compare to Hong Kong.  I made a trip on Saturday which could be the equivalent of going from Arlington to Silver Spring.  On the weekends in DC, you have to budget at least 75 minutes for that. Here I made it in 40.  The buses here don't have schedules - instead they just come, faster than 1 in every 10 minutes, which is a huge change from waiting 30+ minutes on sidewalks in Georgetown.  An online poll didn't have Hong Kong in the top 9 metros in the world (1. Copenhagen 2. London) which in my mind is a complete travesty.  Helped by the small land mass, it's by far the best metro I've ever been on, which includes most of that list.  Also, cell phones work perfectly on the subway, which is both weird and awesome.

Hong Kong is also a 3 dimensional city full of underground passages and skywalks and probably a consequence of its brutal summers.  With all the walkways you can walk all over downtown Hong Kong around Central, through skywalks and malls, without every stepping away from air-conditioning.    This actually involves a difficult adjustment for me because to get around, you need to know not just the streets but also the insides of buildings.  In a city like this, GPS maps are of limited use. It's a complete opposite from the vertically challenged DC.

When you're walking around Central and its overly airconditioned structures, you might think you're in a futuristic city. Not even New York is this modern, this clean.  When you go into a country club you might think you're in England.  When you go deep into Kowloon or out into the New Territories and settle into a Dai Pai Dong, you might think you're in mainland China. It's the same type of restaurants, the same type of trash cans, the same crooked teeth, the same feel that I've yet to learn how to put into words. It's that kind of city, with the highest buildings and the highest Gini coefficient in East Asia. And because of Hong Kong's unique political situation, the poor people of Hong Kong are even less likely to have ever left their hometown than the poor people of China and the US.

After the handover, a relaxed policy of granting rights to its diaspora community resulted in my obtaining a Hong Kong ID card with a full 3 stars.  Though I've never lived here, I have more rights than British expats who have been here for over a decade.  I don't even need to show my passport at the airport, compared to China where I need to obtain a visa beforehand. My experiences in China had always been very different from my time in Hong Kong.  China was legitimately a foreign country, with a language and customs that I only had a rudimentary grasp of.  Hong Kong had been a city I flew into to get taken out to dinner by my relatives. Only now that I'm preparing to live here for the indefinite future do I realize how much I have to learn.  I do speak the language, which is both extremely useful and rapidly improving.  However, again I am not outwardly perceived as a Cantonese speaker, which I find both humorous and bothersome.  My American manners and mixed looks shout out foreigner.  A couple times, even when I'm speaking to people in Cantonese, but with their preset perceptions, they still don't realize I'm speaking Cantonese and respond to me in English.  Due to the statuses of English and Mandarin, Cantonese is very rarely learned as a second language, though more so than I had previously thought.  Furthermore, I find myself walking around the streets of Kowloon understanding stray talk unbeknownst to their speakers and find myself in a surreal world.  I don't really understand the way of life of the people I'm listening to, yet somehow I understand them.  Somehow, the language I learned in my kitchen in Newton, and practiced in the restaurants and shops of Chinatown in DC and heard on my iPod from Australian radio podcasts allows me to communicate with these people on the streets of Hong Kong.  It feels almost like a loophole in the system, as if I found a clever way around the general rules of being a foreigner.  In addition, I also speak Mandarin in a very different manner than the locals here.  Most locals can understand Mandarin a lot better than I can, but butcher their pronunciation and don't know general slang.  My unusual and imperfect command of Beijing Mandarin confuses people even more.

In short, it's been a jam-packed and unusual week.  There is quite a lot I didn't see coming, and I haven't even started work or frisbee yet.  I haven't gone out yet as I don't have any friends here.  I've barely even had time for any touristy stuff, and thus have no interesting pictures besides the insides of apartments I saw.  But life is an adventure, and this may be unlike any other adventure I've been on.

Multiculturalism in the world

Multiculturalism is often viewed as a jumble of customs and thoughts, sometimes contrasting, confusing or conflicting.  It's manifestation in various countries can be modeled as a melting pot, or as a salad bowl.  So too were my thoughts on multiculturalism a jumbled mess.  Openly obsessed with diversity, I have seen and lived the multicultural experience several times and have come out with a boatload of strong opinions and stories. Surprisingly, it was a summer spent working at the United States Bureau of the Census, exploring mathematical models, that helped to organize my thoughts into a comprehensive theory.  I wasn't expecting to encounter very much outside of math while working in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology.  However, I hadn't counted on the Census Bureau being a leading place for social and racial discussion.  As I wind up my internship, I actually find myself coming out having unified advanced statistical theory with my approach to conceptualizing American and global society.  All in all, I really can't imagine getting more out of an internship.

Too much confusion - bring back Confucian!

First off, I want to establish why we should care about multiculturalism.  I've come to believe that culture is the most important defining aspect of who we are.  Even if you'd rather define yourself by what you like or what you do, say as an outdoors enthusiast, or a painter, or a vegetarian, all that is inexorably tied to where you come from and how you grew up. This isn't fatalistic as there's obviously room for individuality, but the culture that surrounds us do more to shape our actions, thoughts, perspectives and even appearances, than we realize. Our culture is crucial to our self-identity; thus people who grow up without one easily identifiable culture (i.e. they moved around a lot) often struggle with figuring out who they are.  Don't underestimate the significance, or flexibility, of self-identity.  So when culture is so vital to who you are, it's important to understand its effects when interacting with someone from a different culture.

Multiculturalism of some form has been well-woven into the fabric of the USA - it's permanent presence here is acknowledged.  Even if it's questioned, dissected or hotly debated, I don't know of anybody campaigning to expunge America of its many cultures. But in Europe, this debate is at the forefront.  An article by Kenan Malik this summer sharply critiques Europe's approach to multiculturalism.  This year British PM David Cameron announced his belief that state multiculturalism has failed in the UK.  And this was all BEFORE the terrorist attack in Norway by Anders Breivik, motivated by anti-multicultural sentiments, particularly against the perceived Islamization of Europe.  While everyone rightfully denounced Breivik and didn't take his manifestos seriously, I thought that this should have been an opportunity for us to reflect on how to combat xenophobic sentiment in Europe. After all, if we have defense analysts all over the world studying Islam and the Jihadist movements it has spawned, shouldn't we have people studying European anti-multiculturalism and the terrorism that it is starting to spawn?  Maybe Breivik is a unique case, a hateful anomaly, but I think there is certainly an underlying concern that influenced him, and it needs to be addressed. The politics of Dutch party leader Geert Wilders, largely founded on anti-Islamism, is further concern.

It seems easy to dismiss these people as intolerant and racist, especially coming from America.  We're citizens of a country founded and continually refueled by immigrants, boasting a list of notable immigrants which includes Alexander Hamilton and Albert Einstein and immigrant children Colin Powell and Barack Obama.  We almost want to cry out to the rest of the world, "It's not so bad!"  But one needs to peer through the single-colored lens of other countries and understand where they're coming from.  The very fundamental existence of most European nations arose from the concept of a nation-state as the political self-determination of people with shared ethnic identity.  The concept of a German or an Italian people has not always existed - it took the establishment of a common identity to unite a group of people, distinguish themselves from others, and eventually lead to the boundaries that we know today.  Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia etc are just some examples of European nations who are fundamentally linked to the traditional nation state concept.  The necessary byproduct of a common identity is a sense of who you are not, the establishment of an other.  This process is not as natural as it might appear.  Today we have Spanish-speakers in Spain, French speakers in France and Polish speakers in Poland. However, we could easily have Leonese speakers in Leon, Occitan speakers in Occitania, and Silesian speakers in Silesia. Point is, the establishment of a nation state is generally a result of political forces, and ex post facto creates a national identity at the expense of regional ones.

Anyways let's look at a small village. Imagine everyone and their ancestors have lived in that village for as long as anyone can remember, and a villager will not only know every other villager, but who their parents were/are.  The village shares an identity, which might not be of consequence when you're focusing on local gossip and news, but when compared against even the next town over, suddenly arises.  A whole village sharing this much in common tends to be more trusting.  The residents are likely very friendly, very sharing, don't lock doors, and rely on the communal accountability to take care of deviants.  The inhabitants will likely all share pride over their village, their customs and their specialties that distinguish them from other villages.

And it's true, when you bring in outsiders, you disrupt this communal utopia.  When people don't know what their neighbors believe in, when new arrivals don't understand or respect the history of their new homes, when people sharing the same space don't get along and don't realize why they can't get along.... well then you see some of the problems we've seen in these last few centuries.  Then you get these villagers who see their town overrun with Chinese restaurants and Turkish gyro stands and sigh, "can't we go back to the old days?"

I think the answer is no.  We can't go back and we shouldn't.  We're more prepared now as a society than ever for multiculturalism but we still have a long way to go.

The thing I've learned this summer is that there is still so much we don't know about race and culture in our world.  I can look up Census data and tell you that 18.5% of blacks never graduated high school, compared to the national average of 14.7% and have a mean household income of $33,632 compared to the nationwide $50,221.  There is a lot of data that I can pull up to show that blacks in America are poorer, less educated, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be murdered.  Yet still in 2011, I can't tell you why this is. We can't pinpoint what percentage of black impoverishment is due to racism (institutional or blatant), historical oppression stemming from slavery, African American culture, recent immigration or the-almost-tabooed genetics. We really can't. We don't understand race and society nearly as well as we think we do.

We don't even understand race as much as we think we do.  How many "African-Americans" are descended from American slaves?  How many of them are descended from Caribbean slaves? How many of them have more white ancestors but still identify as black? How many of them have more black ancestors but identify as white? How many of them are descended from African immigrants who have no slavery in their family history? How many look black but identify as Hispanic? How many are have immigrated from Europe, the Middle East or elsewhere and identify with those regions?  How many people identify with multiple of these designations?  Does it even make sense to group all these people together?

Race is already extremely complex and it's only going to become more so.  No longer can we impute someone's language, culture and nationality from their race, or vice versa.  The examples I listed in the previous paragraph are not theoretical cases, they are real growing demographics. In a generation or two, you may see significant amounts of African immigrants coming from China.  Already we're seeing lots of Asians coming from Latin America who may identify as Asian, Hispanic or neither.

So the great theoretical light bulb that clicked on for me in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology was that it's not about the data.  Statisticians who focus too much on the data, full of imperfections and uncertainty, tend to find imaginary correlations and develop models that overfit the data.  The best approach is to develop a fundamentally sound model which can recreate data similar to the data that we observe.  I think the way we understand race in our multicultural society needs to be the same way.  When culture is so important to identity and race fundamentally separate from culture, an approach identifying people by their race is so immensely flawed.  An approach that uses race as a contextualized component of our local culture goes much farther in explaining the way our country has evolved and where it is headed.

I think that accepting multiculturalism may be impossible to teach.  We all learn in schools not to be prejudiced, not to avoid stereotypes, not to use certain words etc. before we know what any of that means. This early accepting education has failed created a country without racism.  No, we need to experience multiculturalism in order to embrace it.  We need to see a world where our political leaders come from all sorts of backgrounds and so much more.  In this country we need to see more Blacks and Hispanics in higher education and operating fancy restaurants, more Asians in the media and in professional sports, more whites in the service industries.  We need to see black people speaking Japanese, Hispanics speaking Swahili, white people eating with chopsticks, Arabs with long beards praying in front of a cross, a Chinese guy with a British accent hosting a water skiing show.  We need to see all permutations of human origin and behavior so that we can see that all of that is possible.  And that is where Europe is currently lagging.  They haven't had the chance to see people of different genetic material become versed in their national cultures for multiple generations.  Until they do, they will not realize how flawed the small-village model they have operating under has become.

Lastly, I think we can accomplish all of this without all out assimilation.  I think culture is just like language, you can be fluent or conversant in multiple cultures.  While many people have argued that immigrants and immigrant children will always have conflicting loyalties and identities, I steadfastly disagree based on my personal experience.  I am 100% American.  I was born and raised in the Boston area and went to college in the nation's capital.  There is nothing significant about the American culture that I have seen around me that I don't get.  Maybe when I was a little kid I'd ask my parents why the other white kids did this or that, but by now I get it.  I love my Boston sports, I identified fully with my place among the DC yuppies and I will take off my hat and sing along to the Star-Spangled banner.  In addition, I get a fair amount of Chinese culture and it has added enormously to my life.  I will fly to Hong Kong in a few days and have a large meal with family members around a lazy Susan, where the youngest will incessantly check the teacups of everyone else and refill their cups, we'll start and end the meal with soup, and I will be in sync every step of the way.  In DC, I hang about Chinatown and learn to buy giant boxes of delicious rice noodles for $4, find haircuts for $8 and learn that there are many Chinese descendants in Vietnam and Malaysia and that they speak Cantonese.  Knowing all this just added an extra dimension to my life, it didn't take away from the American dimension already present.  I'm so grateful and lucky to have this multicultural lifestyle.  I just hope that with global political forces understanding, more and more people will also embrace their multicultural lives.