Wringing Whitewashing Out to Dry

"Whitewashing" has been the term put to the casting of white actors/actresses into non-white roles. It has picked up steam as a mainstream issue, with Asian-American actors speaking up and Last Week Tonight doing a great hilarious piece covering the prevalence of this phenomenon. While I have no experience in the film industry, I have lots of experience as an Asian-American, and my journey co-opting my identity has been influenced by Asian-American representation in TV and film, and have thus observed this practice keenly.

Empress Dowager Cixi and advisor

In the pre-Civil Rights movement days, Hollywood whitewashing was flagrant, with blackface and yellowface deemed socially acceptable. The WTF-inducing examples are plentiful, from Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface and an ensemble of white people in 55 Days at Peking playing Chinese imperial figures.

Someone you know saw this in 1965

While plenty of articles grant this issue facetime and recount historical context, I haven't seen a fleshed out and nuanced understanding of 1) why is whitewashing an issue? and 2) when is something whitewashing? In creating this list, I found so many confounding grey areas. What is the right move here? What does the slippery slope take us to? This discussion deserves more back-and-forth than it gets.

Let's start with the easier question. Why is whitewashing bad? And why does it happen? In a movie like 55 Days at Peking, the whitewashing is dripped in colonialism. You can almost see the thought bubbles, "We need a Shakespearean-trained dramatist to portray Empress Dowager Cixi, not one of these Chinese actresses without theatrical class." We've certainly come a long way, but even if filmmakers nowadays do not harbor these same sentiments, they still need to be wary of belittling the abilities of minority thespians. However, the biggest complaints raised now is less the overt racism, but rather the institutionalized practice of reducing opportunities for non-white actors.  Filmmakers counter that they need bankable stars, so many of whom happen to be white. Minority actors rightfully respond that to become bankable stars, you have to get cast in the first place! Missing out on roles early on means missing out on exposure means missing out on more roles later on - producing a very white snowball effect. The mentality of sticking to "known quantities" reflects a lack of imagination, a peculiar quality for the film industry. The downstream consequences of this practice include an all white set of Oscar's Best Actor/Best Actress nominees #oscarssowhite.

The connections-heavy world of Hollywood, where many stars are themselves children of stars, poses a difficult barrier of entry. But less industry-specific causes exist too, such as self-segregation which pervades throughout society. I am sure there are many white producers, writers and directors who have primarily white friends - many who don't normally hang out in minority-filled crowds. The reverse is far less true, because minorities in this country by definition find themselves outnumbered by white people all the time. This bleeds into show business. So often you can just tell watching a show that their screenwriters are all white. Consider Friends, the successful decade-long show starring 6 white people, produced by another 10 white people. However this show was considered super mainstream. Lots of minorities watched it, and we didn't find that weird at all.  Sure the show only contained white experiences, but we're used to seeing that. Consider Tyler Perry's House of Payne, a successful show lasting 8 seasons, starring and produced, and watched nearly exclusively by black people. This whiteness-as-a-default is an entrenched characteristic of our society, (which is why fantasy characters or race-blind roles still so often end up played by white actors), and if you don't hang out with minorities, you only know the default.  Our society is moving towards Aziz Ansari's Master of None, which just as obviously appears written by a diverse staff who find it normal to discuss race.

In addition to depriving actors of color, when films addressing historical or cultural topics are whitewashed, the film itself can suffer. History and culture are passed down among sub-groups and latched onto one's core essence. It's very awkward then to see dances, rituals or poetry performed by people to whom they have not been passed down to. Not saying it can't be done with class, but I shiver hearing a white person recite translated Confucius. There is just this knee jerk reaction of "oh no you don't go there."

Where we draw the line is quite challenging though. Everyone gets offended differently and you can't please everyone, especially in this age. Zoe Saldana was criticized as being not black enough to play Nina Simone, and there was even furor at Irishman Pierce Brosnan playing Englishman James Bond.  As a stutterer, I would have preferred an actor with a real speech impediment play the main role in The King's Speech, though Colin Firth's performance won me over. Personally, when examining a casting or adaptation decision, my first barometer is the simple visual test: "does this person look the part?" Secondly, I believe strongly that power dynamics must be contextualized. Because French people do not face discrimination in America, we examine the Hollywood adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo differently than an adaptation of the West African story of Anansi.  Thirdly, "cultural distance" too factors in casting. Certainly there are differences between Latin American countries, but a sense of cultural proximity might allow Puerto Rican Benicio del Toro to portray the Argentine Che Guevara. What determines whether cultural distance is too great though has no one answer.

When Natalie Wood plays Maria in West Side Story, she doesn't completely fail the visual test, but her casting is still squeamish because of the uneven power dynamic between white Americans and Puerto Rican Americans. When Gary Oldman puts on an accent as the Russian villain Ivan Korshunov in Air Force One,  it's just a good performance in an action movie. Despite the Cold War history, present day dynamics between Russians and Brits or Americans are not particularly sensitive. And in the Russian-German-Kazakh co-production of Mongol, the majority of the cast is Mongolian, but main characters Genghis Khan and his rival Jamukha are played by Japanese and Chinese actors respectively, who learned Mongolian for their lines.  They look the part though and the movie flows without a hitch (at least to the non-Mongolian speaker). When Korean-Americans Randall Park and Ken Jeong play Chinese-American characters, they basically pass the visual test and aren't stealing jobs from Chinese-Americans - in our current setting, they are all in the same boat (or fresh off it), struggling for limited roles.

I need to add that I am holding Hollywood to a very high standard. Film studios all around the world, whether it's India, China or Nigeria, practice their own local ethnic washing methods. When those studios become as rich as Hollywood and those countries become as diverse as 2016 America, we can judge them to the same standard. And I know that Hollywood studios face intense financial pressure, and that a huge chunk of Americans do not share my sensitivities, or even actively oppose them as too "politically correct." But we should challenge nonetheless, for not only does Hollywood exhibit a microcosm of American ethnic issues, but it also commands the rare podium to affect it.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it is getting way better. We have Anthony Mackie playing a rewritten Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Irfan Khan in Jurassic Park, John Bodega in Star Wars etc. We have hit shows like Empire, Fresh off the Boat, the Mindy Project and Jane the Virgin.  And then there's Hamilton. The progress has been real. But now, let's explore how much further we have to go.

From least to most egregious:

#13 - Dr. Strange (2016) - Tilda Swanton as the Ancient One

There's a fair amount of uproar about this role of a Tibetan spiritual guru being rewritten as a "Celtic mystic." I actually have less problems with this than you might think. I'm not a reader of the comics, but given that this character was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to be a wise male sorcerer capable of astral projection, I read this character as an exoticization of Tibetan culture and all things "Far East" by western society? Since the Himalayas have historically been so remote and inaccessible to foreigners, myths like Shangri-La have long fascinated western culture. This character is more a manifestation of these myths (and maybe reverence for the Dalai Lama) then a proper imagining of a superhero Tibetan. 

Furthermore this character comes with political baggage. First, there are 8 million Tibetans in the world but only around 9,000 Tibetans in America. It's fair to say that it is logistically challenging to find a qualified actor of Tibetan ancestry to play this major role. Second, Marvel wants that China audience and Tibet is a very sensitive issue to China. The PRC Ministry of Culture probably would have blocked the movie had it cast a Tibetan actor or acknowledging the character's origin as Tibetan. That doesn't mean Marvel must bow to this political pressure, but they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Furthermore, let's say a Chinese actor looked and fit the part. That would have been even worse (power dynamic)! That sort of casting would have further marginalized Tibetan people. Giving it to a Korean or Japanese or Indian actor doesn't feel right either.

All in all, reimagining the character as a female Celtic mystic and getting away from those issues and letting Tilda Swinton do her thing isn't too terrible to me. The worst sin is the studio's admitted effects of trying to make Tilda Swinton look more Asian - they should go all the way and make her look super Irish or Scottish instead. Since the movie isn't released yet, we can wait and see how awkwardly they appropriate Tibetan customs, but until now this more or less gets a pass.

#12 - A Mighty Heart (2007) - Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl

I never knew even after watching the trailer for this film that the wife of beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl was of part Afro-Cuban descent (and part European and part Chinese). With tanning sessions, Jolie actually arguably passes the visual test, though she does need to wear a wig, which crosses into the ickiness of hairstyle appropriation. The real life Mariane Pearl actually stated she was elated to have Angelina Jolie portray her. Hard to blame her, it doesn't get more flattering than that. You could talk me into compromising my ethnic heritage if Brad Pitt wanted to play me in my life movie. Pearl's opinion matters a lot here, especially her own racial self-identity, and since she's also part-white, it's not the greatest sin to have a more white actress portray her.

#11 - The Social Network (2010) - Max Minghella as Divya Narendra

Initially, this one also didn't strike me as too offensive. Minghella's father is Italian and his mother from Hong Kong, of mixed Chinese, white and Indian Parsi extraction, just like my family. His appearance could kinda pass for Indian. But it really irked Aziz Ansari, as he expressed in Master of None ("We're all 1/16 something. I'm probably 1/16 black. Do you think they're going to let me play Blade!?"). And so I thought about this from his perspective more, and I realized here you have this historical Indian-American person and over 3 million Indian-Americans. I think you can do a little better than someone who "could kinda pass for Indian." We also seem to have one level of credulity for an Indian actor trying to pass as white, but another level for a white actor trying to pass as Indian.  Chalk this up as passing the visual test with a C-, but denying opportunities and insulting a real life figure.

#10 - The Martian - Chiwetel Ejiofor as Vincent Kapoor, Mackenzie Davis as Mindy Park

Even without reading the book, during the movie I could tell from the names that the casting seemed suspicious. While the author was not explicit, Vincent Kapoor was envisioned as Indian and Mindy Park as Korean. In the movie, they are Black and White respectively. Fictional whitewashing isn't egregious, especially when the race of the characters are irrelevant to the storyline. But on the other hand, this still diminishes the types of roles available to Indian and Korean actors respectively, which is the whole reason we're having this discussion. In a case like this, I believe the minor role, in this case Mindy Park, is more aggrieved, because of course you can find an Asian actress to produce a quality 2 minutes of screentime. Vincent Kapoor is a major character, and if you think Chiwetel Ejiofor is the person able to bring the most out of that character, I'll at least entertain your argument. I'll make the argument that you could have cast an Indian actor and the film would have done just as well artistically and commercially.

#9 - Aloha (2015) - Emma Stone as Allison Ng

This one caused an uproar when it happened. Emma Stone's character was inexplicably identified as half white, quarter Chinese, quarter Hawaiian, and based on a real person director Cameron Crowe met. When I first heard about this, I actually got excited! I assumed that Emma Stone must have been part Asian and I just hadn't known, like Keanu Reeves. When I discovered she wasn't, I assumed Cameron Crowe must have been part Asian. How could a white guy just cast a white girl to play a character like this in 2015? It made no sense. I haven't seen the movie, but I read that Allison Ng's ethnicity is largely superfluous to the plot. It establishes her connection to the island's heritage, but can easily be written out. So why leave it in at all?

Crowe says the character was inspired by a real person of that ethnic background and super proud of it, who really did appear white. If Crowe really thought this Asian heritage was important to the story, he should have cast a mixed Asian actress like Olivia Munn or Chloe Bennet. If he was committed to Emma Stone, he should've left out that part. But the current status treats mixed heritage as a prop, something you can simply put on as opposed to something that defines who you are. It does no justice to the nuances of growing up as a mixed person, especially in a diverse place steeped in colonial history like Hawaii.

#8 - Prince of Persia (2010) - Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia

So Persians are Caucasian, and Jake Gyllenhaal, a descendant of Swedish immigrants to America, is also Caucasian. Still I don't think I need to explain how culturally distant Sweden and Iran are, and this film gives zero fucks about that. This movie is the classic case of big budget Hollywood, casting a good looking, poorly acclaimed star and culturally appropriating non-Western concepts for a Western audience. The entire main cast is in fact white American or English actors, getting as diverse as Ben Kingsley, whose father was of Indian descent. If this movie were to be remade, it should probably occur in a fictional fantasy land without any obvious takes from real places.

#7 - Cloud Atlas (2012) - Jim Sturgess as Hae-Joo Im

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, this entry may elicit a WTF reaction. But there are legitimate artistic considerations here. The plot occurs several time periods, with the same actors and actresses reprising multiple roles over the periods. This includes a futuristic Seoul where several non-Asian actors, notably Jim Sturgess but also Hugo Weaving, James D'arcy and David Keith, portray Korean characters. To make their facial features appear more Asian, CGI is used essentially to create epicanthal folds. The net effect looks completely terrible. Such obvious high tech yellowface is somehow not considered socially taboo, as opposed to blackface, which is avoided in the movie.

It's fascinating to me how blackface seems to be the only clearcut ban in the Hollywood whitewashing game. Its slavery-days origins means that using blackface is either explicitly racist or ignorantly insensitive. Using makeup to appear Hispanic, East Asian or South Asian does not have the same historical baggage - but it still looks ugly. When a member of a privileged class makes such effort to look like a less privileged class, the simple visual strikes a queasy feeling that strips away human dignity.

The decision to reuse actors to portray the reincarnation themes of the book can be judged solely on its artistic merits. The cast displays impressive range and the makeup artists deserve great props. The yellowface does not further this artistic vision. Though its a strategy more common for the theater than for the cinematic screen, I think keeping the actors' appearances minimally altered and letting the audience use their imagination would have been best.

Most stunning may be how little controversy this yellowfacing generated. Researching this, I unfortunately came upon a PopSugar piece praising all the transformations, and gushes over the Brit heartthrob like this: "I have just three words for you: Asian Jim Sturgess." Jim Sturgess' own deleted tweet from the controversy showed his own enlightened understanding of the issue. "Yellowface? Blackface? Pinkface? Pinkberry? Blueberry? Strawberry? Bananas? Frozen Yogurt? All the toppings?  ... Lovely!" What the actual fuck?

#6 - 21 (2008) - Jim Sturgess as Jeffrey Ma

We got a pair of Jim Sturgesses! I'm not great at Blackjack, but I think when you're dealt a pair of Jim Sturgesses, you never split.  In this version, Sturgess doesn't go yellowface - he just replaces the ethnicity of a real person, the Chinese-American MIT graduate blackjack-winning. Ma downplayed his whitewashing and said, "I would have been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an Asian playing me." Despite my Brad Pitt joke earlier, I totally disagree with Ma here. Maybe fame or financial gain were more important to him that historical accuracy, and the film was also a dramatized adaptation of a book that itself significantly dramatized the real events, and Ma was not very involved in the whole process. Instead of criticizing him, it is much easier to criticize the filmmakers who "would have loved to cast Asians in the lead roles" but such Asians were unavailable. I doubt the white filmmakers ever thought what it would be like for a non-white actor to portray them in a movie inspired by their lives. 

#5 - Elizabeth, Michael and Marion (2016) - Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson

I think this yet-to-be-released movie is one of the most interesting cases on here.  Unlike Mariane Pearl, Michael Jackson explicitly stated that he did not want to be played by a white person and was proud to be a black American. Of course, Jackson was a weird, weird man with the palest skin and facial features that didn't look like anyone. Most black actors would not look anything like him. It remains to be seen how good this movie's makeup team is, but Joseph Fiennes doesn't look anything like Jackson either. Maybe studio execs thought, "If we can make his brother look like Voldemort, we can make him look like MJ." I think the appropriate course of action is to search for a light skin black actor, maybe a Wentworth Miller or Jesse Williams. No you're not going to get a perfect casting here, but you can at least try to not insult the American audience. For his part, Fiennes is pretty incredulous: "I'm a white, middle-class guy from London. I'm as shocked as you might be." 

#4 - The Last Airbender (2010) - Everything About the Movie

We had such high hope M. Night Shyamalan. Normal hope, not the kind that culminates in winning the Razzie for Worst Picture. The movie is based on a Nickeldeon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender that is not actually a Japanese anime as I had thought, but an American creation by two white guys, heavily inspired by Japanese anime. The Avatar universe is full of architecture, themes and people  heavily inspired by East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Inuit and New World cultures. Though voiced mostly by white people, the characters are depicted in the anime as variously Asian. We can have a separate conversation about whitewashing in voice casting (it's not as bad), but let's see how the producers and Shyamalan handled this film. On one hand, the cast is very diverse with many parts for young actors and actresses of color. On the other hand, the main protagonists are all white (and not well-known stars), and the antagonists South Asian or Middle Eastern. All of these characters in the TV show appear East Asian or Inuit. Now, you can do something creative in this fictional world and put characters of an ethnicity into clothing, cultures, and even names atypical of that race to stretch our assumptions. But when one ethnicity represents the good guys, minority ethnicities represent the bad guys, and none of them are true to the show, then people will start judging the cultural appropriation, criticizing the acting and eventually put your film on this list.

#3 - The Lone Ranger (2013) - Johnny Depp as Tonto

I'm sure this movie wouldn't have been made without a big name playing Tonto of the Comanche tribe, and none of the big name stars in Hollywood are significantly Native American. Way back in the 1950s, Canadian Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels played the same role. I'm not sure whether this indicates that Hollywood has regressed in 60 years, or whether Canada has just always been more progressive. Depp claims to be part Cherokee, or maybe part Cree, and it's all pretty dubious. If you want to talk about uneven power dynamics, no example is more skewed than Native Americans and white Americans. The producers touted the presence of a Comanche advisor on set and they had dialogue in the dying Comanche language. Whatever. The film is a stupid remake of a stupid radio show of a stupid racist genre and it deserved to lose all these producers millions of dollars.

#2 - Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) - Christian Bale as Moses + Everything Else

This is basically the same concept as in Prince of Persia and Gods of Egypt (2016) with casting decisions that piss off modern Egyptians and don't give minority actors a chance.  Except the production team of Gods of Egypt actually recognized their mistakes, with director Alex Proyas and Lionsgate issuing apologies for not considering diversity. Director Ridley Scott of Exodus went the other way, dropping this memorable quote, "I can't mount a film of this budget...and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such...I'm just not going to get financed." This is not without truth, but it belies the fact that Scott didn't even try to fight this trend and simply doesn't care to understand why people like me are so bothered by whitewashing.

#1 - Dragonball Evolution (2009) - The Movie

The reason why I rank this movie with a $30 million budget worse than those larger films is because this one's personal. If you want to understand the backlash against whitewashing, you have to understand it on an emotional level, and no example causes more of an emotional response in me than this one.

I freaking loved the Japanese anime Dragon Ball Z as a kid. In elementary school and middle school, I made sure I was home at 5:30 on weekdays to watch Goku kick butt. I didn't think too much about the cultural setting of the show, or even that the main human characters are all supposed to look Japanese. I had no idea that Goku was inspired by Sun Wukong, 孫悟空, the Monkey King from the Chinese folktale Journey to the West. None of that was important, the show was just awesome.

When I heard about this movie, it'd been many years since I cared about Goku, but I still got excited. Then one look into the trailer I physically shuddered. It was bad enough adapting the Dragon Ball Z epic into an American high school coming-of-age story. It was criminal to put a white guy into the main role. It was worse to keep most of the supporting cast Asian. I felt like it was a direct referendum: Asians are not cool enough to be the hero. They can play the supporting role, the wise kung fu trainer, but white people will never accept you as a leader or star. Having a no name white actor (who the fuck is Justin Chatwin) playing Goku, name unchanged and all, and Emmy Rossum (Shyamalan-esque career post-Mystic River) playing Bulma, is so mind-bogglingly jarring I still cannot bring myself to see this movie. You can make all the intellectual arguments against whitewashing, but sometimes the best argument is a visceral one. Fittingly, this movie was universally panned.

Searching for a Bar in Kashgar

Why are these Chinese people speaking Arabic? It was 2008, and passing by a restaurant in Beijing I glimpsed a TV show with what looked like Arabic subtitles and became very confused. This was in fact my first encounter with Uyghurs speaking their language Uyghur, which is written using Arabic letters. From afar, China had seemed like a very homogenous country. It wasn't until that summer in Beijing and the Olympics opening ceremony when China paraded out its 55 official ethnic minority groups that I learned about the diversity of this huge country.

Not Arabic

The next summer, ethnic tensions flared into deadly riots in Urumqi. I watched from afar as pictures of citizens wielding hammers and knives on each other circulated, and heavy Han Chinese military presence moved in like an occupying army. The historical and racial dynamics transpiring out both fascinated and terrified me. The Uyghurs claimed that the Chinese were actively Sinicizing the area with an air of racial supremacy. The Chinese countered that they were bringing technological advancements into the area that gave the Xinjiang greater economic development than neighbors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. Both arguments are well-founded.

It was impossible for me to enter Xinjiang with an open mind. My liberal American value system far outstripped any sort of Pan-Chinese ethnic unity. However I have been living in the East for a while, and my outrage at the PRC oppression of Muslim minorities was chastened by my nation-neutral awareness of western hypocrisy. Xinjiang is unequivocally a modern Chinese colony, with its people and resources abused by a far away ruling power. But so are the Americas also stolen land from indigenous people, with the lack of outrage resulting not from good governance, but because the indigenous injured have been so decimated and assimilated. This doesn't excuse modern Chinese policies - limiting religious expression, encouraging Han migration to diffuse Uyghur culture and maintaining economic policies to keep a Chinese upper class - but it does make me pause before pointing one finger out and three fingers back at me.

Political backdrop aside, sitting in Guangzhou airport clutching a ticket with DESTN: URUMQI highlighted, an apprehension reared up that I hadn't felt in ages. It was befuddling - after traveling alone for over two months, now I was getting boarding jitters. Gone were the young European backpackers out to have some adventures. In Southeast Asia, nearly every destination came with a bus route and a dozen recommendations, but now I was jetting off alone entirely on my own initiative, to a land that had seen many foreign travellers in ancient times but far less in modern times. On one hand, these butterflies in my stomach were oddly refreshing. They reminded me of how I felt before I spent my first significant time abroad eight years ago, back when I was easily amazed by simple wonders. Since then I've spent too much time with people who unconsciously display their worldliness by acting matter-of-factly with new places.

We flew across the vast Gobi desert, which historically has been responsible for so much of the geopolitical history of the region and the intermittent relationship between the Han Chinese people and the Uyghur people. The sheer difficulty of journeying across deserts and mountains resulted in only the stablest of Chinese Dynasties interested in relations with their western neighbors. The Han Dynasty kicked off trade along the Silk Road, the Tang Dynasty resumed and furthered it, and the Mongolian Empire (Yuan Dynasty) facilitated it. It was really the Qing Dynasty though that extended Chinese territorial domain to Xinjiang, forming the basis for China's current self-proclaimed geographic mandate. I am certainly not alone in believing that Xinjiang and Tibet are not traditional lands of the Chinese people, but the PRC works hard to spin history to match their political agenda.
*****

Bizarre

Urumqi is a majority Han Chinese city, and the arrival experience at the airport felt like previous arrivals in Chinese airports. It is not nearly as old as the city I would fly into the following day. At the taxi line being hounded by black cab (unlicensed cars) drivers, I found myself unintentionally engaging in racial profiling - I'm not sure what it says that I was thrilled that my first cab driver in Urumqi was Uyghur. He initiated conversation by asking me where I was from, in strongly-accented Mandarin that unexpectedly sounded a lot like an American exchange student. "你是什么国家人？" We conversed about what he knew of America (very little), his travels outside Xinjiang (Beijing and Shanghai), his experience with other foreigners (entirely Russians and Kazakhs) and commerce in the city (more and more prosperous). He willingly teaches me a bunch of basic Uyghur words, most of which I've already looked up on omniglot but have never heard pronounced. "Rakhmat" he says, with a deep and guttural kh sound that I struggle to replicate. "谢谢。Thank you." "Men. 我。Sen.你。" We pull up in the middle of a crowded, dirty, poorly lit intersection and my driver takes another look at the address written in Chinese. "是这个。" This is it. At first glance I only see a despondent office building which looks like it couldn't gain a single LEED credit, but upon reading the upper level signs I realize my hotel is hidden somewhere above the 15th floor.

*****
Urumqi is the major city closest to the pole of inaccessibility, the point on this planet's landmasses that is furthest from any ocean. Yes despite the heavily populated coastal regions, China's borders also contain some very inland areas. Its latitude is around that of Portland, Maine which presented quite a shock to my body having flown in from Singapore, right at the equator. I was packed for a couple months of Southeast Asia backpacking, but amazingly I was able to scrounge together enough layers to not freeze. My underarmor proves extremely clutch underneath four layers of fleeces and shirts as I explore central Urumqi, where clumps of dirty snow still gathered on the sidewalks in late March.

Wikitravel had been a great guide throughout my travels but the wisdom of the crowds appeared to dissipate in Xinjiang. The article for Urumqi is noticeably less informative and grammatical as the one for Luang Prabang. I only have a morning to explore though and I choose to seek Erdaoqiao Bazaar. I read Rob Gifford's China Road as pre-trip research. Gifford visited Urumqi twice and was shocked to discover the second time around that this bazaar had been transformed from an incredible traditional Islamic market to an awful generic Chinese faux cultural block. Still, Wikitravel reports that the "surrounding area is the heart of the traditional Uyghur community" so I feel like it's worth a couple hours rather than my next best alternative, a hike up Red Mountain. The Erdaoqiao Bazaar actually looks quite interesting, with decorative Islamic arches spanning the upper level and a huge screen broadcasting loud Uyghur language programming. If I hadn't known it was "fake," built because of top-level Chinese directives, I would have thought it was a cool modern take on a traditional market. The doors were still locked, leaving me to meander through the surrounding streets, shivering.

Steamy

And what cool meandering this was. Massive smoky metal ovens churned out discs of naan while everywhere people were at work skewering raw lamb. I passed by numerous mosques with crescent tipped points towering into the sky. At one point I turned the corner and faced a stack of giant carpets and spent a moment in genuine wonderment expecting one to curl up and hover. I searched for the Tartar Mosque, supposedly at the southern end of Jiefang Road where I currently was. I found a couple of mosques in the area but they were rather unremarkable and didn't seem to match. Asking bystanders was met with confused responses. With a bit of guesswork and luck I found a large ornate mosque to the south of the Jiefang Road.

I caught a taxi back to the hotel. Even before asking, I suspected that my driver was from somewhere in Dongbei, Northeast China. In her thick accent, she told me she had been in Urumqi for 30 years and quite liked it. She seemed like a kind good natured woman. I offhandedly asked her if she had many Uyghur friends. "MEI YOU" she replied unexpectedly aggressively. No Uyghur friends. I was caught completely offguard. "There are communication problems," she elaborated. "Really? I've been able to talk to Uyghurs here, and your Mandarin is much better than mine," I replied. "They just don't understand us," and she left it at that. This perceived lack of communication both baffled and troubled me, as every Uyghur I met in my brief time in Urumqi had no trouble speaking Mandarin. I took a different look at her. She was most likely not highly educated and not received much cultural enlightenment. Perhaps I was experiencing the equivalent of asking a racist white driver in West Virginia if he had any black friends. Perhaps this isn't a fair comparison. Either way, it reminded that a progressive China was so very far away.
*****

In Kashgar, I settled into my former-Russian-consulate-turned-hotel, then quickly set out on foot towards the old town. My phone was a jumble of applications slow to load because of the wifi and applications that won’t load because of the Great Firewall. The Firewall has been beefed up significantly in the past years, now fully swallowing Google Maps, so for the first time in this 21st century Asian odyssey, I ask for a map.


The roads surrounding my hotel were unremarkable, just low density Chinese streets, until I walked past a clearing and glimpsed the old city wall, and a stable of camels quietly placed in front. Unexpected. The city wall was crumbling and surrounded by modern developments - while tall, it was remarkably unremarkable. The Old Town had a few actual marked entrances leading off into very different, triangularly tiled meandering paths. The lanes were quiet, with a few kids playing and the odd motorcycle humming by. Knee deep into the old town, I realized I'd never been anywhere like this. That's the simplest way I could summarize my experience. We don't get exposed to a lot of Central Asian culture in the United States. We hear about the Russians to the northwest, the Chinese to the east, the Indians to the south and the Persians to the southwest - we even went to war in nearby Afghanistan. Ironically the people in the middle of so much cultural development are eventually drowned out by those from the fringes. This position at the junction of so many civilizations very much shapes the city, as well as the lens I used to view it.

The Silk Road was not a road, but more like a series of routes that facilitated transcontinental trade from around 100 BCE to AD 1450. It obviously covered a lot of ground, but if you were to associate any one city with it, it would probably be Kashgar.

It is as close to the geographic center of the trade domain as you could pick, with routes leaving the city to the northwest, southeast and northeast. Trade items passing through the city included silk, jade, gold, frankincense, myrrh and religion carried by people from China, Arabia, Persia, Armenia, India, Tibet and many other Turkic or Indo-European people from the region.

In Kashgar I grasped around for memories in other places that can help me understand this place. The mosques and stately minarets were like elsewhere in the Islamic world, the lawless motorcycle driving like in Southeast Asia, and the chaotic outdoor market where Bluetooth sets were sold next to naan bread stands reminded me of India. There were herbal tea shops, meat butchered and hung out in the open air, buns steaming outside in baskets, and alleyways that conjured up cousins in Lijiang or Xianggelila. And there were some obvious signs of modern China, the white metal road barriers, the double strip of yellow rubber tiles on the sidewalk, the ubiquitous propaganda.   But really nowhere I've visited really connected. The closest experience I could really compare with was actually a series of photographs I saw documenting the Russian Far East in the early 20th century (link). I wasn't expecting this obscure memory to resonate, but the silk babushka scarves, the thick wool hats, the timeless but plain stonework, the hand crafting and the aged Eurasian features all echo here. Kashgar did not feel like a Chinese city - and I hope it never does.
*****
I had to resist the urge staring at every face. Growing up in a society where we are taught to demarcate between white, black, Asian and Hispanic, people who defy categorization fascinated me. Central Asians are often described as a mix between Caucasians and Asians, and certainly I found many features that did look halfway between East and West. What surprised me was the diversity of the people. There were people that looked straight up Russian, and others who were darker than many Indians. I summoned up the courage to ask many of these people if they were Uyghur, and they all said yes. There were others who looked more Chinese, and some who looked rather Arab. Overall though, most people did not look half-white half-Chinese - their features were simply unique. Sometimes we forget that human appearances cannot be broken down into constituent parts.
*****

All roads in the Old Town lead to corners of a main square, with China's largest mosque the Id Kah Mosque situated at the head. Some modern trappings include a very touristy set of camel statues, a knockoff KFC, and neon strips highlighting the arches of a few major buildings. The square was not overly touristy though, due to the fact that there were almost no tourists. On my first day, I saw no westerners save for one German family, and less than two dozen odd Chinese acting like tourists. The stores selling kitschy souvenirs were untrafficked, while people actually engaged in real commerce next door, purchasing socks and hats. Kids ran around the square yelling and flying kites, reminding me of the book The Kite Runner. The book is set in Kabul, but the movie was actually filmed in Kashgar. For some reason, filming in Afghanistan has been difficult in the 21st century, and Old Town Kashgar 500 miles away is apparently as well-preserved a Central Asian Islamic city as exists. Walking around the stone and dirt streets, I felt like I had entered a time warp. So many factors in the Old Town combined to create a 19th century atmosphere - the lack of motorized transport, the market bartering, outdoor craftwork and an incredibly low proliferation of modern clothing. My just wearing jeans was enough to stand out as a 21st century time traveler (basically no one mistook me for being Uyghur).

I turned the corner on a quiet residential alley and saw a grey wooden ladder leading onto the flat roof of a house. I immediately thought of Aladdin running through being chased by palace guards. Back out into the larger streets, a bunch of middle-aged men chatted while one of them hammered on an iron pot on an anvil. I stopped and stared at him work. I didn't know that anyone anywhere still made pots by hand, especially in this country with more factories creating these sort of goods than any other. He couldn't possibly be doing this for tourism reasons, because there is no tourism.

This New York Times article detailed a trip to Kashgar in 1994. It's amazing how much of the account matches my experience in 2016. In a country where cities are changing exponentially, I'm stunned that I've found a place so frozen in time.
 *****
The pilgrim monk Xuanzang, the leader of the pack in Journey to the West, went through Kashgar on his return trip from India in 640. Marco Polo came by around 1273. Xuanzang used a Sanskrit name for the city, Srikrirati, which the Chinese than obliterated in transliteration to Shule. Marco Polo called it Cascar. Though they came so many years apart, Kashgar was a major oasis trade center, by far the most magnificent city around, throughout this time frame. When Xuanzang came by, the area was probably Indo-European speaking, but the region had become Uyghur speaking by the time Marco Polo stopped by. I wonder if there remain any single stone on which these two travelers may have stepped. Probably not. (I have walked across the Lugou Qiao, or the Marco Polo Bridge, where Marco and I probably have shared stepping stones) Kashgar still feels like an old town, but was this main square even here during the Silk Road heyday? Xuanzang and Marco were both very multilingual, and probably could have communicated to the inhabitants here. I wonder if I could have communicated to either one. Xuanzang's Tang dynasty Chinese is the common ancestor of modern Mandarin and Cantonese, but probably largely unintelligible. I also have a basic grasp of ancient Latin and modern Italian, which might average out into Polo's medieval Venetian? There probably would have been a lot of hand gesturing going around.
*****
On the topic of communication, Mandarin ability among the Uyghurs ranges greatly, especially in Kashgar. One salesman told me "Zooey pianyi!" It took me a minute to realize he was butchering zui pianyi, or "cheapest price." Incredible. Do the Uyghurs learn Mandarin from reading Pinyin with English pronunciation rules, just like first year American students?

An entire restaurant staff didn't understand Mai Dan. I've never been anywhere in China where Maidan wasn't understood. I then said "check please," and the waiter returned with a pot of tea.
The English writing is universally terrible, which is hard to excuse in this age of decent machine translation. The writing on the "Fregrant Comcubine Tomb" looks like a google translate printout, from several versions ago with typos thrown in. It ends with "the German journal Bright Mirror goes: love between this Uygur maid and the emperor is evidence for greatunity among different ethnic groups in China. This structure is ranked as a key cultural relic unit under the protection of Xinjiang Uygur people's government."

Walking down the old town streets, almost everything was closed. I found one restaurant that seemed slightly open, but a woman stands right in front of me before I enter. She seems stunned and inadvertently blocking me, like I was a health inspector. I asked, "Can I sit?" and everyone immediately became more polite and pointed me to a table opposite a little kid slurping noodles. "Do you have a menu?" I asked. The waiter pointed to a piece of paper stuck on the wall with 8 lines in Uyghur. I looked back to him haplessly and he informed me, "We have two foods. 拉面，炒面. Pulled noodles, stir-fried noodles."

I checked my WeChat photos and found one of the guys watching over my shoulder. He asked/exclaimed that the photos were of Kashgar. I told him I was a tourist from the US, and we started a basic conversation. When he asked me something more complicated, I couldn't understand. He shook his head and started speaking in Uyghur, and I thought he'd given up until I realized he's talking to the kid. The kid looked up from his noodles and asked me, "你在美国干什么？" I'm flabbergasted. His accent was flawless. I'd not talked to a single 7 year old kid since I started traveling because none of

them could speak English. I asked, "gong zuo? Occupation?" The guy nodded. I decided not to say I was an unemployed aspiring data scientist, and simply said gong cheng. I expected to have to explain this as “make buildings”, but amazingly the kid translated immediately. I'm not sure if he really understood me, I had no conception of engineering at the age of 7, but I didn't press the point. I continued conversing with the restaurant staff, with the kid serving as a very disinterested translator. They asked me all these questions about America, like what's the weather like, that only made sense if you thought of America as a single place. I told them that like China, the US is large and diverse. I showed them the pictures I had on my phone of US and Hong Kong, and could only imagine the reference points they used to perceive these far off lands. “Nice car!” the kid exclaimed in a picture of DC townhouses. I hadn’t even noticed a car at all, but sure enough a BMW was parked in the foreground.

I asked them if they'd ever had a Han Chinese customer in the restaurant before. The staff shook their head emotionlessly. I honestly wasn't expecting this response. This restaurant was on a street just blocks from the main square. The Old Town was very much Uyghur area, but I would have thought at least one Chinese tourist would have grabbed a lamb skewer and sat down inside at some point over the years. "Rakhmat," I said leaving. Of all the times I've learned bits and pieces of a foreign language, never had I elicited greater smiles.
*****
I was doing a lot of walking and not a lot of drinking. I'd never been more isolated from drinking establishments in my life. Even though the Uyghurs are very devout Muslims, Chinese law prevails in town and there is nothing forbidding alcohol. I could walk down the Old Town streets drinking out of open bottles if I didn't mind antagonizing everyone around. However it seemed that an understanding had been reached and even in the Chinese parts of town, there was not the same open-Tsingtao-bottles-on-the-sidewalk culture as you'd find elsewhere in China.

LonelyPlanet directed me to Karakorum Cafe, which was closed, and Wikitravel told me of John's Bar in the "ancient british consulate." I make my way to the hotel that had also taken over this site and asked for John's Bar. I was met by an utterly flummoxed concierge. The hotel was uncharacteristically high-end, but after consulting with three other staffers, no one could direct me to a bar. I asked them where the old British consulate is, learned that the original building was just around the corner, but that I didn't want to go there. Ignoring their advice, I made my way in darkness to an empty old building, looking certainly haunted. Undoubtedly those ghosts may have had some amazing stories, but they were unlikely to have any beer for me.

I walked into a fancier restaurant looking for a bar. The first person I spoke to recoiled in fear and referred me to another waiter, who then referred me to yet a third waiter. This waiter then pointed outside and said quzhu. Minutes of wrangled communication ensued before I realized he was saying chuzu and telling me to take a taxi to a bar.

*****
We learned a bit about the Great Game in school, the political match between the British and Russian Empires for control over Central Asia. This explains the former Russian and British Consulates here. I never knew that China played a role in this game as well, and ultimately the crucial role in Kashgar's fate. Kashgar has been ruled by a lot of different nations over its history, and one of the last non-Chinese ruler in the 1870s was this opportunistic Tajik named Yaqub Beg whom Wikipedia just calls an "adventurer." By now, sea routes had replaced the Silk Road and westerners would attract a lot of attention in Kashgar. Yaqub Beg was coy with the great powers, playing them off each other. Eventually the Russians backed away and he tried to appeal to the British, but before any alliances materialized, the Qing Dynasty armies swooped in and deposed him.
***
If you visit Kashgar, try to be there for a Sunday, when people from all over the region gather to an enormous livestock market outside the city. There are probably four nationalities present trading four species - cattle, sheep, goats and a few packs of camels. I planned to wake up earlier and grab a taxi to the market before 11, and alertly responded to my alarm at 9:30. China is weird though in its insistence on one time zone. Kashgar is the westernmost city in China, more than 2 time zones behind Beijing, and thus the place in the world most screwed by illogical time zoning. Official "Beijing Time" was still used, but people utilized a local time two hours back for basic affairs. The sky was unusually bright that morning, and upon checking the time in different world cities, I realized that my phone had overnight somehow switched from Beijing time to informal Kashgar time, and what I thought was 9:30 Beijing/7:30 Local was actually 11:30 Beijing/9:30 Local. Scrambling my many layers of clothing together, I hurried to the lobby and ran into Abdul, the founder of a local tour company and one of two fluent English/Uyghur speakers I found in the city. "Going to the livestock market? I'm about to go myself to take pictures for my website." I jumped in the car with him and an older driver named Irkhan.

It's hard to say whether the Livestock Market is crazier because of the people or the animals. On the massive flat dirt field off the side of the road, organized chaos stretched to the horizon, making it difficult for me to gauge numbers.  The coats of the cattle and sheep ran the greyscale gamut with some brown in the mix. The livestock were tied with gentle ropes to sticks running down the market, while trucks would drive down in between and offload new cargo. Cattle were forcefully pulled down from the pickup trucks, but that did not compare at all to the challenging and often brutal upload process. I saw a truck driver overly optimistic about how many cattle he could drive away, and after much convincing of a reluctant cow, managed to fold her legs and squeeze her in with 7 other cows. It was udder madness. The market was at once both pandemonium and systematic - though the absence of signs and price tags left me confused, the challenging logistics of gathering all these farmers and livestock from miles away were made to look easy.

Amidst the bleats, baas and moos, a dozen or so camels had a row in the back of the market. They were fairly neglected, allowing me an opportunity to take a decent camel selfie, and I wondered what their use was to modern farmers. Surely they were no longer used for long range transport - perhaps they had more touristic end goals? It appeared that people may have been bartering livestock for livestock, but I also saw stacks of red Chairman Mao's in the mix. How odd it seemed to me that the man from Hunan was watching over the sales of goats between Uyghurs and Kyrgyz people in this field in Central Asia? I asked Abdul if he owned any livestock, not sure if this was even an appropriate question. He shrugged and said, “yeah, my family in the north have about 40 sheep. And a few cows.”

*****
The Old Town can maybe be walked in 20 minutes, if you walk quickly, which is difficult because of all there is to see. A bustling multi-lane modern road cuts it in half, under which tunnels lined with stores facilitate pedestrian traffic. A ring road essentially surrounds this main part of town, and another one around the greater urban area. Going south from the Old Town you reach the main east-west artery of Renmin Road, which is full of both new stores and street fruit vendors, with lots of Uyghur-Han commercial exchange. A bit further south though and Uyghur signs disappear almost entirely, and the area quickly transforms into a generic Chinese city downtown. Minarets vanish from view, replaced by Communist-style housing blocks with characters like 天南尚居 jutting into the sky. The city hall is on the south side of Renmin Road, situated behind a giant square that looks an awful lot like Tiananmen Square, with the red Chinese flag waving over everything. On the opposite of Renmin Road is a colossal concrete statue of Chairman Mao resting atop a colossal concrete block, reaching a height of 24m. The symbolism of placing such a large statue of a Chinese figure here is very in-your-face and a technique the British employed in many of their colonies. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt poignant Yellow Guilt. I felt pain for the attitudes and policies of people of my ethnicity, regardless of my lack of connection with the directly culpable.

I felt like I was traveling with a cheat code. This Central Asian culture with its bizarre bazaars should be off limits to me. Yet through a geopolitical quirk, the people of Xinjiang could speak Chinese, and even had adopted some Chinese mannerisms. Accustomed though I was to foreigners speaking Mandarin, I was still continually mindblown by seeing a mass of people casually dropping “aiyas” and “bukeqi” around.
The Chinese part of town had familiar supermarkets, bakeries and a very appealing hot pot restaurant. Uyghur food was great, but there wasn’t much variety beyond the noodles and lamb. Not many vegetables grow out in the desert. The hot pot place tempted me, but then I thought to myself I would have some great Chinese food in my next stop, Beijing. And in the stop after that. And for the rest of my life. I ate local again that night.
*****

I made out the words “Orange Street Bar” on the 2nd floor above street level behind some construction. Finally! My  drunk slump was over. The bar was discreet, with no open windows or loud music seeping out. It was a Chinese-style sit down place with a karaoke stage. I ordered a Tsingdao and watched as a Han woman went onstage to perform. To my surprise, she opened with Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” When she finished and walked off, I approached her and told her, “Your English is great!” She instantly disproved me by asking, “pardon?” I translated my compliment, and she told me she loved singing in English but wasn’t quite comfortable conversing in it. She sat down and told me her story. She was from northern Xinjiang, but had moved here to teach music at a local elementary school. I asked her if she ever considered moving to the bigger cities out east, but she told me people of her 户口, registered residency, have a hard time finding jobs outside of Xinjiang. She told me all her students were Uyghur and that she could hold a basic conversation in Uyghur. “Most Chinese don’t want to. Relations aren’t very good,” she mentioned. From her tone I could tell she was an “ally”, doing her part to improve social issues. From the corner of my eye I saw a male manager gesture to her, and she abruptly said goodbye and left. I finished the beers by myself, reassured and glad I had this conversation.

*****
I hustled out for a run the next morning. Like every city I’ve been to in Asia, Kashgar did not accommodate for outdoor runners. I dodged sidewalk stalls and errant motorcycles, despite their dedicated lanes.  Electric motorbikes dominated the scene, which was great for emissions and noise pollution but bad when I couldn’t hear them sneak up on me. As I ran past a park populated by playing children, a Han cop waved his hand at me. I warily made my way over, and he asked me what I was doing. Elsewhere in Asia, I had tried to hide my Americanness, but here with underlying racial dynamics, I pulled out my American card very hard. In English, I told him that I was a tourist and running. The cop asked in Chinese if I had ID. I told him I just had my hotel keycard and showed it to him. To my surprise, the cop inspected it carefully. A Uyghur cop joined in the fray and asked if I was a student. “No…I’m old..can I go now?” The Han cop gave me back my hotel key and I ran off. It seems this shakedown was more out of curiosity than anything else, but it never feels good to be pulled over by a cop for no reason.
****
Back at my compound, I found a sign for “John’s Information Service & Café.” It pointed to a very cluttered storage room. Apparently the café only opened during the summer – it didn’t make business sense to rely on the offseason patronage of the odd Chinese American alcoholic backpacker. I shrugged and set off for an exit in the back of the compound. Suddenly I glanced back and saw a pillared building….that looked suspiciously like a drinking establishment. What else was hidden in this former Russian compound? Dead bodies, AK47s and remnants of the Sino-Soviet split perhaps.
I returned to the suspected bar that night and found a club jumping so hot I couldn’t believed I only discovered it on my last night. All those blocks walked for a bar seemed pretty ill-conceived on hindsight, but such is life without GoogleMaps. Everyone inside was Uyghur. Aha! Perhaps the populace wasn’t as orthodox Muslim as I’d thought. A live band played traditional Uyghur music and the dance floor was very active. I nervously tiptoed to a table and scrolled through a menu of whiskey bottles, settling on two bottles of Stella Artois. The scene was so outlandish and dazzling that I never got properly grounded in my surroundings. The interior decoration included lamps and panels with intricate mosaic panels. Smoke and colored lights filtered the dance floor, while tables came standard with a hookah. All in all, the place was a pretty sweet venue.

I studied the dance floor closer though and saw that everyone looked at least a generation older than me, wearing what I can only describe as “granddad clothes.” Couples were dancing in pairs – a few women were dancing together. Something about the way they danced was odd though. After every song, they would break and file back to their seats, and the band would resume five or so minutes later. I looked around at the tables, studying the orange drink in the glasses, and suddenly I realized that quite possibly no one was drunk. The drinks may have all been tea or energy drinks. When the dancing resumed, I felt convinced that no one on that floor could possibly be inebriated. I felt ashamed for doubting the piety of these Kashgari Muslims. I briefly considered venturing onto the dance floor purely for the sake of this blog, then realized that there was nothing I’d less like to do, and hurried out of that place.

Minority Report

Visiting the Long Neck Karen village was a complete afterthought. I had left Pai at the crack of dawn and arrived in Chiang Rai that afternoon. I had only two objectives in Chiang Rai, the Black House and the White Temple, both eclectic modern takes on ageless spiritual concepts. However the two attractions were not merely opposite thematically but also geographically opposite from Chiang Rai center. With our late ETA, I had resigned myself to requiring two nights in an otherwise ho hum city to see both sights. But our bus had made an unexpected stop at the White Temple en route, enough to gaze at its spiky glory in a half dozen angles, and shortly after arrival at my Airbnb I caught a cab to the Black House. 

Through the chance sharing of both a bus ride and Airbnb booking, I had acquired a travel buddy, a Chinese girl named Qiao Li from Chengdu. We strolled around the Black House leisurely for an hour and I was feeling very content having knocked out the two birds with one stone, but Qiao Li wanted to keep hunting for a third bird. She pointed out that the "长颈村" was not far, and I had no idea what she meant. Long neck village? This wasn't highlighted in Wikitravel. She pointed at her tourist brochure and there was a picture of a woman in pink embroidery with shiny brass rings covering her neck. It took me a minute to mentally remove the rings, upon which I realized her neck must've been extraordinary long. Part of me was interested in going - there were many ethnic minorities I had only read about in the Demographics sections of Wikipedia articles of places. Part of me was fascinated to learn more. But part of me was reluctant because of the feeling that I wasn't going to learn more, and this part was right.

I visited a Miao village in Hunan within the past year, as part of a group of a few dozen Chinese tourists. The visit was one of the fakest experiences of my life, complete with a large sign at the town's main gate that said Miao People City … in Chinese characters. The whole place was a charade for tourists - an interesting experience, but not one that shed any light on Miao culture. Most real Miao people were adapting to modern China, doing regular life activities and trying to move up in Chinese society. Maybe there was some existential dread on how to preserve their traditions, but preservation wasn’t accomplished in this village by weaving baskets in front of tourists. For their part, I couldn't discern any sense of disillusionment or outrage from the other Chinese tourists.

At the beginning of this southeast Asian voyage I was breakfasting in a cafe in Sapa, at the northern tip of Vietnam. The cafe staff expressed their curiosity in me, and we exchanged pleasantries. Their English was good, and one of the girls had been learning Mandarin for all of a week. I smiled at her efforts, and she told me that it was her 4th language, after English, Vietnamese and her native language of Hmong. My first reaction was surprise - I hadn't been able to tell that they weren't Vietnamese. My second reaction was a light bulb going off - Hmong is the real name used by the people whom the Chinese call Miao. I tell them about the other Hmong people way up to the northeast, in China where the Chinese call them the Miao. They tell me that the Vietnamese call them Meo, which sounds the same as the Vietnamese name for cat, and so they don't like the Vietnamese. I hesitate for a moment, then inform that Miao sounds the same as the Chinese name for cat. The girl scowls. "Now I don't like the Chinese."

If I rack my brain hard enough, there is a bit more in there about the Hmong. They have been a stateless people for a long time, scattered from southern China by Han Chinese invasions and living in pockets throughout Southeast Asia - China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia. Many Hmong joined the US-led anti-communist efforts in the Vietnam war and its spillover into Laos and Cambodia, and when the war ended, they faced reprisals from 3 governments. The Hmong refugee crisis resulted in many Hmong being resettled in the US, seemingly chiefly in Minnesota of all places. One of my Georgetown classmates was born to Hmong refugees, and the movie Gran Turismo highlights this community. I'd figured their homeland was gone, inaccessible to someone like me, but here I was in a cafe speaking English to a Hmong college student.

All of this was in the back of my mind as I entered the Karen Long Neck village. I didn't know nearly so much about the Karen (despite having friends with that name). I had read something about them in Myanmar but had forgotten it all. We paid a 300 Baht entrance fee, which after free admission to the White Temple and Black House felt exorbitant. A long dirt path down the hill was calm and devoid of any extravagance and I held out hope that this could be a genuine village. Those hopes were dashed so fast.

It was towards the end of the day and several huts were empty. A single woman with the neck bracelets was there and smiled as she saw us, her hands mindlessly weaving on her wooden loom. As we walked past, other women materialized out from the huts and immediately went to work on their looms. Their bamboo huts were lined with scarves and trinkets for sale, because you know, who doesn't keep goods for sale on their front porch? Karen villages apparently are in a state of perpetual yard sale. 

The tour saw women and kids come out of the woodwork, all dressed in traditional dress and bangles. Everyone was very friendly, giving a Sawadee Ka and smiling for pictures. The women wore a full 8 inches of neck rings, with larger rings at the base. Some had on modern fleece jackets, but with more traditional-looking scarves, shawls and sarongs underneath. A little girl smiled and held some sort of game board, with a few inches of neck ring on her. I wanted to give everyone a hug and $100. Where are the men? Are they unfit for display because they don’t wear neck rings? Where are the "real" Karen people? Are they blended into Thai society, secretly waiting tables in Chiang Mai? Are they all still on the farms, tilling the land that the Thai people deigned to give them? How much more are they making in selling their culture to tourism?

This tourist site encompasses other villages, "inhabited" by other minorities, who aren't advertised as heavily because their necks are of normal length. I am introduced to the Akha, whom I had never heard of before. Their village is entirely inhabited by elders, and they're offering a set of wares that might have come from a factory. To my untrained eye I can't tell any difference in their appearance - they could all be Karen playing pretend for all I know. The women wear white headdresses and lots of bangles around their necks. Two of the elders who welcome us speak some basic English and even more Mandarin and throw many wares in our faces. As I ask them about their goods and history, I inadvertently get the elder man to call for a dance performance. Dozens of Akha elders with unenthusiastic expressions come out of their abodes and grab thick sticks, and drum the sticks straight down into the ground unleashing a deep earthen beat. I watch with 1 part awe and 9 parts embarrassment. After the minute long performance, Qiao Li walks away and I guiltily drop 100 baht into a jar in front of the dancers. I muster a thank you in their language, long gone from my memory, and feel pity that this community has to resort to performing like trained monkeys.

Walking back up the hill to the site entrance, I wonder what are the best options for impoverished village minorities here. In this region of Thailand, groups including the Karen, Akha, Lisu, Meo and Hmong are called “Hill Tribes,” mostly all relatively recent migrants from Yunnan province. They probably settled in the hills not because that’s the terrain best suited for their traditions - growing food in mountainous regions is rough work - but because the Thai wouldn’t let them settle in the better lowlands. They had to retreat to the more remote areas to not be bothered. And now they could try to continue their traditional lifestyles, subsisting on their crops and with limited access to modern infrastructure. I mean, how many scarves and brass rings does one need to trade for a car? Or do they try to assimilate into larger Thai society, starting from the dead bottom? Or do they engage in some sort of tourism contract like this, getting some revenue from curious people like me, and figuring things out from there?

How blessed am I to be from the world’s largest ethnicity, holding the passport of the world’s most powerful country? How would it feel to be a minority in every single country, speaking a language no one else deigns to learn, official absolute nowhere? 

I used to be idealistic regarding linguistic conservation and diversity, but I now believe that there is no way for people like the Akha to advance economically and simultaneously preserve their culture. When you read figures about how many languages are dying each year, they're languages like Akha and those of even smaller communities. Any stateless minority will eventually face the same challenges. There are some stateless people that we hear about in the western media, but most are not covered. Maybe my thoughts are too western-centric and bleeding hearty, and maybe most Akha people live happier lives than me. Nonetheless, my visit to this Long Neck Village reinforced a belief that the nationality and ethnicity you are born to matters far too much in this world.

The next day I boarded a boat to Laos, and drank beers with a bunch of western backpackers. We boozed lazily as the boat eased its way down the Mekong.

Guide to Cantonese for English speakers who know Mandarin

The official languages of Hong Kong are English and "Chinese", the latter in quotes because it actually encompasses a language family. The Hong Kong government calls this policy "biliterate and trilingual - 兩文三語" to indicate that printed texts have English and Traditional Chinese versions and spoken English, Cantonese and Mandarin are all accepted. Cantonese is the de facto spoken language, the home language of about 90% of the populace and the historical language of the region (although some of the earliest settlements in Hong Kong were Hakka speaking). Lots of educated people, whether civil servants, business people or Disneyland staff, regularly conduct services in three languages. While there are more multilingual regions of the world, the overall trilingualism in Hong Kong is still rather impressive. Since the colonial reign ended in Hong Kong in 1997, even the casual observer can tell that the general level of English has worsened but the level of Mandarin has improved greatly.

People often ask how different are Mandarin and Cantonese. It's suffice to say they are mutually unintelligible, but the nuances get complicated. If you are familiar with the Romance language family spread in Southern Europe, you could analogize that Cantonese and Mandarin are like Spanish and French. The Romance languages probably started diverging mainly following the decline of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, and Mandarin and Cantonese probably diverged from Middle Chinese around the 6th century. However the geographic spread between North and South China is much greater than between Italy, France and Portugal. Nonetheless a single Chinese written script and a sense of ethnic unity kept the language from diverging as much as it normally would, while the emergence of nationalisms and independent orthographies in Europe divided a dialect continuum into distinct official languages.* Tl;dr - you could say the Chinese languages are more divergent than the Romance languages in some ways, and less in other ways.

Carlos Douh - The poster boy for a westerner who's learned good Cantonese

Most English speakers who move to Hong Kong (and plenty who grow up there) don't learn Cantonese or Mandarin. They already speak one of the official languages so it's easy enough to get by in Hong Kong. Obviously though, being able to speak English and Cantonese in Hong Kong leads to a much fuller experience. Learning the language is difficult and the Hong Kong environment doesn't make it convenient. While Mandarin-learning resources are bountiful, Cantonese-learning resources barely exist - which is why I'm writing this. One major problem is the lack of a phonetic standard - there is a system called Jyutping but it's not commonly used. Nevertheless, I believe it's definitely possible to learn Cantonese in Hong Kong especially when you come in with a background in Mandarin. My office was very Cantonese heavy, and mainland Chinese arrivals would nearly always be conversant in Cantonese within a year. Hong Kong has a thriving community of former China expats, who eventually move to Hong Kong for its unique blend of China with western characteristics. If you're one of them and don't know Cantonese, this is for you. From my anecdotal experience, there are 100 adults who learn Mandarin well for every 1 that learns Cantonese well.

Every word in Mandarin can be said in Cantonese as well. In fact all Chinese speakers can read the same text. However the modern written language is similar to formal Mandarin, and so even though Cantonese speakers can read written Chinese, they will use different words and expressions in conversation. The most important things to learn are 1. common sound changes for the words that are mutually shared and 2. these colloquial expressions.

I know that I'm not the most qualified person to write this, but I don't see the more qualified people writing this, so here goes. Instead of using jyutping, I've chosen to use subjective phonetic English spelling, which is kinda what I've always used. I'm also going to ignore Cantonese tones here, even though there are 9 and they are important. However I subscribe to the school of not focusing your language-learning efforts on tones. Nearly every Cantonese speaker I've talked to would be hard-pressed to name all 9 tones, and do not actively think about tones while speaking. Languages are organic and make human sense, and I think with enough repetition, the tones will naturally come to you.

Let's start with the sound changes:

1. Sound Changes

qi -> kay

星期 －xīngqí - sing kay - Week

奇怪 - qíguài - kay gwai - Weird

其中 - qízhōng - kay zhong - Among them

國旗 - guóqí - gwok kay - National flag

zhi - > jee

一至九 - yīzhì jiǔ - yut jee gau - One to nine

只係 - zhíxì - jee hai - Only

支持 - zhīchí - jee chee - Support

手指 - shǒuzhǐ - sou jee - Finger

知道 －zhīdào - jee dou - Know

(jik is also a common change, such as 直 - Straight)

bai -> baak
一百 - yī bǎi - yut baak - One hundred

白色 - bái sè - baak sik - White color

(some other characters like 拜 are just pronounced bai)

xian - > seen
先生 - xiānshēng - seen sang - Mr.
電線 - diànxiàn - deen seen - Electric cable
 新鮮 -  xīnxiān - sun seen - Fresh

ji -> gay
幾多 －jǐduō - gay do - How many
飛機 - fēijī - fei gay - Airplane

自己 - zìjǐ - jee gay - Oneself
基本 - jīběn - gay boon - Basic
記得 - jìdé - gay duc - Remember

you -> yao

有 -yǒu - yao - Have

又 - yòu - yao - Again

左右 -zuǒyòu - jor yao - Left right

郵件 - yóujiàn - yao geen - Mail

石油 - shíyóu - sek yao - Oil

Note: when I first started learning Mandarin, I always got 有 and 要 confused. Cantonese 有 just sounds too much like Mandarin 要. Vice versa isn't quite so true, but it's still confusing.

yao -> yiu
要 - yào - yiu - Need

姚明 - yáomíng - yiu ming - Yao Ming

腰 －yāo - yiu - Waist

gao -> go

蛋糕 - dàngāo - daan go - Cake

高興 - gāoxìng - go hing - Happiness

報告 - bàogào - bo go - Report

jian -> geen

再見 - zàijiàn - joi geen - Goodbye

一件事 - yījiànshì - yut geen see - One thing

建築 - jiànzhú - geen jook - Building

堅定 - jiāndìng - geen ding - Firm

(many jian are also pronounced as gaan such as 簡單 gaan daan and 一間房 yut gaan fong)

yang -> yeung

太陽 - tàiyáng - tai yeung - Sun

羊肉 - yángròu - yeung yook - Lamb meat

Ok I think that's a lot right there. First note: every single one of those sound changes have exceptions. They are just general rules that I tend to use whenever I come across a word that I only know in one language and need to guess in the other language. I'd say they work more than half the time. Second note: A bunch of sounds have no common changes, like shi and xi. Third note: I decided to just write all these examples in Traditional Chinese, as used in Hong Kong. If you are only familiar with Simplified, I honestly don't think it's that hard to gradually adjust to Traditional. This post may serve as a primer for your transition. However below, I do write the Mandarin phrases in Simplified and the Cantonese equivalents in Traditional.

2. Phrases 

是 －係 -  hai - To be

不 － 唔 - ng - Not

你怎么样？ - 點啊你？deem ah lei? How are you?

为什么？ - 點解？ deem gai? Why?

什么 - 乜嘢 or 咩嘢 - mut yeh or meh yeh (interchangeable) - What

没有  - 無 or 冇 - mou - Not have. Cantonese just combines these two words into one. Despite this, the usage doesn't change. 有冇 is exactly the same as 有没有. Because the writing of Cantonese-specific characters is not standardized, you do see both characters used.

我们 －我地 - ngo** dei - We. 地 is used exactly like们. 你地 (lei dei) means you plural and 佢地 means they (keui dei). 他 is only used in writing.

这里 - 呢度 - ni dou - Here. Substitute 呢 in all cases you would use 这

哪里－邊度 - been dou - Where. Substitute 邊 in all cases you would use 哪

刚刚 - 啱啱 - ngaam ngaam - Just now.

现在 －而家 - yee ga - Now.

听得懂  - 聽得明 - tang duc ming - Understand.
喜欢 - 鍾意 － zhong yee - Like

饭馆  - 餐廳 - chaan tang - Restaurant

乘电梯 - 搭𨋢 －daap leep - Take the elevator. Hong Kongers throw in more English words in general than Mainland Chinese, but this is an example of a nativized word. Leep actually comes from "lift"
当然 - 梗係 - gun hai - Of course. Although dong yeen has now entered common parlance.
美女 － 靚女 - liang leoi - Pretty girl. Useful.
帅哥 － 靚仔 - liang jai - Handsome guy. 仔 is used much more in Cantonese to denote child or dude.
老外 －鬼佬 - guai lo - If you're a white guy, this might one of the first phrases you learn.
的 - 嘅 - gor - possessive indicator. This is slightly tricky. Cantonese doesn't do possessions quite the same way, using the measure word instead. This word is used when the measure word is 個, as in 佢嘅朋友 keui gor pung yau, his friend. In fact most people just write 佢個朋友, but technically the tone 個 changes slightly. For different measure words, just use that measure word, i.e. 我隻貓 - ngo jek mao - my cat.

你吃饭了吗？ －你食左飯未呀？ - lei sic jor fan mei ah? Have you eaten yet? There's quite a lot going on grammatically here in this common greeting. First, Cantonese has it's own word for eat, 'sic'. Second, 了which is pronounced lieu in Cantonese, is hardly used in conversation. "jor" (which sounds similar to the pinyin zuo) is used instead to denote past tense with the character for left typically adopted, and is (usually) used in verb + 左 + object pattern unlike the Mandarin 了. Third, 未 is the Cantonese word for yet. This word is in Mandarin too, but isn't used as often or in the same way as in Cantonese. Sometimes 未 replaces 还, other times like here, it comes at the end of the sentence like in English. Finally, 呀 is a common Cantonese interjection at the end of sentences, like it is in Mandarin. 吗 is not often used as a question word - in fact in Hong Kong Cantonese, ending a sentence in an upward inflection can in fact connote a question, just like in English.

谢谢 － 唔該 or 多謝 ng goi or duo jie - Thank you

Ah the Cantonese thank you. This tricked me up when I first moved to Hong Kong and I kept using the wrong thank you for months. The two thank you's are for mutually exclusive scenarios! Use 唔該 when someone does a basic task for you or something that you asked for, and 多謝 when someone does a medium to large favor, especially if you didn't ask for it and definitely if money is exchanged.

Hope that's a good starter course! If you want to thank me, please say 多謝.

*It's an urban legend that Cantonese was 1 vote away from becoming the official language of China. The language in Beijing has been the government language for three dynasties, and got its English name because government employees (Mandarins) were required to learn it regardless of origin. The Qing Dynasty promoted Mandarin for official purposes in 1909.
**If you can't pronounce the ng in 我, just say o (same vowel as in wo) - half of Hong Kong has dropped the ng anyways.