Asian Calmination - Cambodia

Cambodia

I was excited to cross the border. Besides Hong Kong to Shenzhen, real land crossings have been missing from my life. The process didn't meet expectations though, with lots of waiting time in no man's land and no interesting bits, save the exchange of crisp US dollars. In Cambodia, the ride was very rural until suddenly crossing the Mekong River, urban Phnom Penh arose with little warning. My hostel, 19 Happy House Backpacker, was a couple blocks away from our dropoff point, at #59 Street 13. A wrong turn and a dozen blocks later, I was lost with the early afternoon sun really weighing down on me and my red backpack. When I finally reached the hostel, the staff could not find my booking. Minutes of awkward confusion later, I realized I was at Happy Backpacker, a separate establishment. I circled around even more confused, as Street 13 was somehow between Street 15 and Street 5. I came across #60 Street 13, which was some Malaysians' home. Malays speak English which is great, but they had never heard of Happy House Backpacker despite my protests that it must be next door. Some venting later, I kept walking down the street and finally saw the sign for 19 Happy House several blocks away. I learned the hard way that street numbers have absolutely no meaning in Cambodia.

Spark - eccentric establishment

My first night in Phnom Penh included pickup ultimate with the young athletic Swa players on a barebones mini turf pitch, followed by many beers at a concert hall/beer hall/replica Italian plaza/microbrewery/cafeteria called Spark (complete with sinks specifically designed for pukers in the bathroom) with Asian Ultimate legend Jared Cahners. I learned that the fellow Newton native has been living in and out of Asia since the 1990s, coming to Cambodia for his PhD but quitting shortly before we met, and had various histories of fluency in Mandarin, Vietnamese and Khmer. In between, I met a Japanese/Chinese/Thai Wellesley College graduate Clinton Global Health employee looking for someone to analyze malaria data, a Peace Corps volunteer and some of the pioneers in Cambodian ultimate. I always enjoy entering a new city and observing the makeup of the economy, and the makeup of the foreign population.  Throughout Asia, English teachers abound, but in Cambodia I met many aid workers/NGO veterans. This influx gives Phnom Penh a distinctly non-traditionally Asian feel. The downtown is awash in bars and pizza/Chinese food joints with stories traded in English and French.

I didn't have the best time in Cambodia. Everywhere I felt like locals were constantly trying to fleece the last buck out of me, and it really wore me down. Sure, this vibe was prevalent in all the former communist countries I visited (Vietnam and Laos) but most evident in Cambodia.  Ironically, while I attribute communism for the uninspiring aspects of Cambodia, a better understanding of the rise of communism is my best takeaway from the country. While Phnom Penh dates back to the 15th century, and was called the Pearl of Asia in the 1920s, it doesn't feel like an old city. The French and the Communists had left a grid of dusty and sweaty streets, old architecture too rundown to exude any colonial charm and a skyline dotted by a handful of uninspired modern high rises. There are some golden Wats scattered throughout the city and a major boulevard with a pretty monument in the center, but it struggles to compare to the temples of neighboring Thailand. And though I did not find Khmer cuisine bad per se, my palate was so well primed before and after in Vietnam and Thailand.

The ugly legacies of communist rule, and specifically the bloody genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are thus still very tangible. The government was brutally anti-intellectual, killing most anyone with glasses, education or foreign language knowledge. The country's genocide caused the deaths of around a quarter of the population, an astounding culling of 8 million down to 6 million. When you lose an entire generation of cooks, architects, bureaucrats and writers, cultural devastation is inevitable.

I never really understood communism in history classes. We studied so much about its deleterious effects that it never made sense how such extreme practices took hold in the first place. I read Lenin in high school and Marx in college and still had no idea. But my second day in Phnom Penh involved visiting the Killing Fields outside the city, where hundreds of skulls are prominently shown, and the S21 school-turned-prison-turned-museum, which documents accounts of the atrocities that occurred there. Walking through history, I learned that Pol Pot as a frustrated failed man, who despite an education in France, rode a populist ideology that villainized the educated elite, foreign influences and minorities. The Khmer Rouge promoted rural ethnic Khmers as the backbone of Cambodian society, preaching self-reliant isolationism. If any of that sounds familiar and scary, reread what the regime did after they got into power and be even more scared.

I had planned to be in Cambodia for a brief two stops, before reaching Bangkok for an ultimate tournament. However I mistook the tournament to be a week earlier than it was, giving me another week to explore Cambodia. I'm not much of a beach person, but I figured a southeast Asian trip was incomplete without one, and so I ventured south to the resort town Sihanoukville. There awaited miles of pristine beach facing the Gulf of Thailand, and a bizarre mixture of expensive restaurants and hotels, dirt-cheap bungalows and hammocks, and a bunch of nothing in between.  Young Europeans who were lazing around the hostels for weeks on end seemed to outnumber any other demographic. They were apparently not my group, for in a backpacking rarity, I actively tried to  go out hard and have a good time and came out with no memorable stories whatsoever. Maybe it didn't help that I spent the day reading research papers in my air-conditioned bungalow and was looking for people with whom to discuss global income equality. Sorry I'm just not a beach person.

I quickly moved on to Kampot, a river town that was much more my kind of place. Just two hours away, the demographics could not be more different, with a local economy grounded on its famous pepper rather than tourism. The city's key attraction was an enormous durian sculpted into the middle of a major traffic circle. A conversation the previous day with friend John Johnson alerted me to an abandoned town between Kampot and Sihanoukville, but it was tough to verify on Google. Exploring a charming collection of expat-friendly riverside bars on the east side of the river, I found some seasoned expats engaged in academic research. I asked them about this abandoned town, and the expats enlightened me about Bokor Hill Station. One of them showed me the Google streetview, and pointed at himself standing next to a church. "I was there when the Google Earth guy was walking around with all the cameras!" I resolved to go the next day. 

Curious about the opposite riverbank, I explored a bridge closed to traffic and found a hole in the barrier, evidently used by pedestrians. I snuck over to the west side and found a decidedly more local scene. At an outdoor club blaring Khmer music, I ordered iced beer and cow entrails. On the way home, I passed by the durian, took one sniff of its imaginary scent, and threw up the entrails.

The next morning I was back on a motorbike for the first time since my Sapa fall. From a purvey of Googlemaps, the trip seemed like a 40 minutes straightshot on one major road. However at the 40 minute mark I reached the ticketed entrance to the mountain road, and I realized that the Hill Station was of course, up on a hill, and that Google hadn't quite charted that winding Cambodian mountain road. I drove up into the unknown, made a sharp turn around a bend and nearly fell off my bike. The mountain sloped into the Gulf of Thailand to the south, and the ocean winds crashed down unimpeded. The winds affected me mostly on the hairpin turns, when I slowed down dramatically. More daring motorcyclists zoomed past me on those turns, but I wasn't shamed out of braking - my nerve had left with my palm skin in the mountain gravel of North Vietnam. Finally I reached the top of the mountain, past the construction of a monstrous modern casino, a budding tourism park, some sanitation pump stations. Hiking up a grassy clearing, I found a solitary stone church. A bench that could have been lifted right out of Paris sat undisturbed in front. The church's stonework was definitely weathered, but otherwise everything was in remarkably good shape.  The doorway arch was doorless and I walked into an eerie interior. The multi-scripted graffiti covering the walls and the flower pots in front of religious statues reflected a dichotomy between disdain and worship. A small Jesus on the crucifix still hung overlooking it all, silently witnessing decades of good deeds and sins.

There were no explanatory plaques, but the area had been settled by the French in the 1920s, providing a cool getaway from the stuffy Phnom Penh. It was abandoned by the French twice, ultimately to the Khmer Rouge, and was even used by their remaining forces after a Vietnamese invasion overthrew the regime into the 90's. Now Cambodia has been stable enough that the area is being developed, and the ghost town may itself ghost away. The lack of historical preservation is understandably not a focus (any cultural preservationist would be busy further north), but it still saddens me that so many stories there go untold. With no public information, I had very nearly missed this site.

I had already spent way longer on this hill escapade, and hurried back, driving past the large abandoned Bokor Palace Hotel that was apparently even cooler. The ride down the steep mountain slopes was interminable and I couldn't wait to never drive a motorcycle again. Returning to Kampot in the late afternoon, I was stunned to learn that there were no more bus options returning to Phnom Penh. Turns out the start of the Chinese New Year affects commerce in Cambodia as well, and buses simply stopped operating. The Super Bowl was the next day and definitely watchable in Phnom Penh. Wikitravel did list one alternate form of transportation - car pool. And so I found a bunch of drivers and agreed to pay $20 USD to join an unknown number of people for the 4 hour ride to the capital. I waited in the park for 2 hours, and finally there were 3 other Cambodians joining. The sedan driver and I made 5, and as we hit the main road, I thought to myself this wasn't so bad - Wikitravel had warned that these carpools often crammed 7 into the same car. As soon as I counted myself lucky, our car slowed down and I had to scoot in for another passenger. And then we stopped again, and two woman were sharing the shotgun seat. As the 7 of us drove down the road, imagine my surprise when we slowed again. I shuddered to think of 5 of us fitting in the back, but instead the driver got out and then essentially sat on the new passenger's left lap. And the 8 of us in this clown car of a sedan made our way up to Phnom Penh for the start of the year of the monkey.

Watching the Super Bowl in a Texas-themed bar in Phnom Penh was an experience, but the game sucked and I moved on to take a minibus to Siem Reap. Here again I was a victim of Cambodian capitalism. The minibus was run by a minor agency and not easy to find, and my desperation at potentially missing the ride was showing when I asked a tuktuk driver for help. He ended up taking me for a $1 ride, and literally drove around the block back to where we started and pointed out the agency. Upon landing in Siam Reap, I luckily had saved my hostel location on Googlemaps and realized it was a 3 block walk. I was harassed by tuktuk drivers anyway, and I gave one the address as a test. A $1 ride would have been generous, but this guy brazenly asked for $5. I was more than willing to contribute to the local economy, but such shameless disrespect honestly infuriated me. I told him to fuck off and walked.

No place on my path was as touristy as Siam Reap. In contrast to the well ordered geometry of the nearby ancient sites, the modern city felt like a disorganized cantina of businesses clumped every which way to mine that tourism gold. Hotels and restaurants catering to tourists of all types face each other with services advertised in English, French, German, Chinese and Korean.

Hostel owners advised me it was possible to rent a bicycle at 5am. Indeed it was, but I had to jump over the locked gate of the hostel first. Though I'm not much of a morning person, I biked the 8 miles out of town and reached Angkor Wat an hour before sunrise. The classic view of Angkor Wat at dawn is usually taken in front of a lake, but a tenth of humanity was camped out on that spot. I thought I could take an equally impressive shot from a different angle, and jostled with a separate large group of people for position. I failed to capture any decent photos from the front, except perhaps this one of the crowds. I raced through the temple and tried to process everything. The palace was immense yes, but each column was still intricately carved, the stonework carefully laid. Statues and murals were so commonplace that negative space was a rarity.

Angkor Wat from the back

Nowhere was I more negatively affected by hype than here. I had heard so much of these ruins and even the previous night, a hostel mate had talked about the spiritual experience of witnessing the sun rise in Angkor Wat. In front of the building, surrounded by thousands of people, I did enjoy the bright hues of the morning sun...but I was not spiritually moved. Perhaps my favorite part of the experience was reaching the back of the complex, the sky still in the later stages of dawn, and looking out into the relative peace of the jungle. Whether I like it or not, preconceptions heavily influence my enjoyment, and it is no surprise that some of my favorite experiences on this journey were ones that I had no expectations of at all.

The whole set of ancient temple complexes is often collectively referred to as Angkor Wat, but Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples in the Angkor ruins (Angkor means capital city, Wat means temple). Angkor is undoubtedly the largest and most famous of the many temple ruins attractions in Southeast Asia (of which this trip included 2 others), all with a Buddhism-appropriating-Hinduism shared history. Dating primarily from the 12th century, the city is believed to have been the largest pre-industrial city in the world, spanning 390 square miles, before essentially being abandoned and lost to the jungle for centuries. Angkor Wat is so impressive, reaching the height of a 20 story building, and so revered, being the only building in the world to be featured on a national flag.

I biked over 40 miles that under that brutal Cambodian sun, stopping for coconut water whenever possible. I saw a temple in a marsh, a temple with a giant tree growing through it, and the temple that Lara Croft/Angelina Jolie had run through. By the early afternoon, I was unable to appreciate the ancient wonders around me - I had had my temple run.

There were plenty of temples I didn't get to on my one day of biking, but I didn't go back out the second day. Sure I felt bad, drinking beer in a cafe in the vicinity of some of the worlds' greatest treasures, but I was so tired it was a no-brainer of a decision. Even worse I was cognizant that my lack of appreciation of the temples was a product of my western education. I've learned enough about gothic arches and flying buttresses to admire European cathedrals, but I don't know the first thing to look at when staring at the Hindu/Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference between a temple dedicated to Vishnu or Rama, and the murals tell stories that make no sense to me. Clearly the course of action is to study this history, but I prefer to blast the parochial scope of my education. I explored the rest of Siem Reap that day, and was surprised to find a functioning town with some non-tourist economy, and a very touristy street creatively called Pub Street. Wandering through town, I got hassled nearly every block by a tuktuk driver offering to take me to the temples. Unable to find a respite, I walked straight to the bus station and bought a ticket to Bangkok the next day.

Asian Calmination - Vietnam

The giant red backpack is completely deflated. At its peak it bundled 30 odd pounds and imprinted its shoulderstraps onto my body.  Long hauls in bus hulls and nights on dirty hostel floors has bruised the polyester casing. Somehow it held up and protected my laptop, my clothes and my sanity over the many miles.

The longest trip I've ever taken feels very epic to me and my little world. By plane, train, boat, bus, motorbike or carpool, I made my way through the unfamiliar. I had my resolve tested deep in the jungle, survived hairy motorbike experiences, crossed five land borders, crashed an aviation annual gala, squished into a clown car, bathed an elephant, soared over the rainforest, drunkenly floated down a river, climbed a waterfall, prayed in an abandoned church and refreshed my trove of good stories. I ran into a college teammate in Bangkok, explored the best coffee shops in Luang Prabang and was offered jobs in Phnom Penh and Chiang Mai. I ate street food everywhere but miraculously never got food poisoning, or even had a calamitous toilet encounter.

I had been thinking about a trip like this for a while. I'd enjoyed traveling before I moved to Hong Kong, but 4 years in a great jumping off point fed a growing travel appetite. The more of the world I saw, the more of the world I realized remained to be seen.  Many cities were accessible by short flights, but plenty of fantastic less urbanized areas were beyond the reach of the weekend warrior. If I were to leave Asia, I had always planned on allowing for a lengthier trip to visit some off-the-path areas. And at the beginning of 2016, I made the decision to leave my job and make this trip happen. I targeted places I hadn't yet been able to visit, mainly Vietnam, but I didn't set a real itinerary. I had some vague routes that made geographic sense, but honestly had no end date set. Along the way I hoped to see cool sights, get off the b have fun, learn more about the world and global income inequality, visit friends, and also take "travel breaks" to learn the professional skills to transition to becoming a data scientist. I hadn't intended on this being a soul searching odyssey, but that happened regardless.

The trip weaved in and out of different phases. I departed Hong Kong for Hanoi on January 15, a week after my last day at work. I backpacked through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, while I was more of a digital nomad in Bangkok, Malaysia and Singapore. The portion in Xinjiang felt like a separate trip altogether, after which I embarked upon familiar lands for a friends seeing tour. I returned to Hong Kong on March 28 but continued living out of my luggage for another two weeks there before arriving in Boston (via San Francisco) April 12, making for 35 stops in 96 days. These three months were some of the best days of my life and I tried to never forget how lucky I was to have this whole opportunity.

I get some flabbergasted responses when I recount the whole expedition, as if the whole idea was nuts. I get some nonchalant nods as well - while this may have been my most epic trip, there are plenty of ultramarathon voyagers who sneer upon my measly wanderings.  Some of these expert travelers were great sources of knowledge and inspiration to me. These include Tim O'Rourke, long time Hong Kong expat who tried to bike from Darjeeling to Ireland through Pakistan and Iran in the early 90s, Dave Learn, the long time Shenzhen expat who traveled around the world for over two years, John Johnson, whose Instagram photos have a cult following, and Sam Axelrod, who needs no descriptive appositive.

Vietnam

The instant I landed in Vietnam, I became a millionaire, with more Dong than I knew what to do. I immediately caught an overnight train north to Sapa, a mountain village I had only heard about a few weeks before.  I was in a nervous daze the entire ride, arriving in the chilly darkness into a remote train station an hour away from the town. It wasn't until a local bus took me a main-squarish place that the discomfort eased off and discovery took over.

And I discovered that I'd picked a hell of a start. A simple walk out of town led into gorgeous green valleys with rice terraces carving up steep slopes. The clear weather provided an incredible backdrop to what was probably the most beautiful place on my entire itinerary.  I took a chill hike down the valley to neighboring villages, and on the way back up to the town, I stopped by a cliffside coffeeshop / bar. Sipping egg coffee and beers, I watched as the fog rolled in and out of the valley outside my window, evolving from one sensational view to another. It was as pleasant a beginning as I could ask for.

Sapa was part of a rural mountainous area settled by at least 6 distinct ethnic groups. While it was difficult for foreigners to reach during a long weekend, Sapa was well frequented by backpackers. I quickly began to learn the demographics that made up the southeast Asia, or Banana Pancake Trail, backpacking crowd. There were few professionals based in Asia like me, and far more students in a gap year or about to start work, mostly from Western Europe and Australia. Likely due to greater student loans and a less prevalent traveling culture, Americans were few and far between.

On my second day, I summoned the nerve to rent my first ever motorbike to visit some waterfalls an hour outside town. I immediately braked too hard and fell. I came out of that fall alright and quickly got a grip, and was soon exuberantly cruising along mountain roads. Then the road turned to gravel and I came to a patch mysteriously being hosed by a man. I braked before reaching the puddle and suddenly found my bike skidding and my hands hitting the gravel hard. Emergency thoughts rushed through my head. "Is this how it happens? Is this how people die in accidents?" Half a minute elapsed before I could feel sure that nothing was broken. The man with the hose helped me up and an old man raced down from the hill. He led me to his hut and placed my skinned palms into a bowl of water and watch the gravel sift out. My palms, the right one especially, had little remaining skin. I was wearing long pants, but they had torn apart and left my left knee pretty scraped. I had to get my bloody palms back on the handlebars and finish my ride to a waterfalls. Luckily when I returned to my guesthouse to patch up my wounds, a German couple there revealed themselves as nurses and helped dress my wounds. The damage on my right palm, while superficial,  hindered my ability to carry bags for another month.  The good start to my trip had turned bad quickly.

On my bus from Sapa to Hanoi, I had the luxury of choosing assistance from the Dutch nurse or the Australian medical student to redress my wounds. Hanoi was a hectic city, with its unordered motorcycle madness crazy even when compared to Chinese cities. In terms of crossing the street difficulty, Hanoi is to Beijing as Beijing is to New York City as New York city is to Random Little Town. Within that chaos however, I was able to find lots of chill time within the city's many interesting cafes. The coffee was so good, oh so good, and the food maybe even better.

I stayed in the city's Old Quarter, not far from the west lake with its giant tortoise. Unbeknownst to me, this tortoise died while I was in Hanoi, leaving only three of its species left (am I such bad luck?). The area breathed of the narrow alleyways and makeshift market places, organically winding streets free of the bird's-eye decrees of urban planners. There was plenty of griminess - Hanoi is still in a developing country, but it's a capital with an illustrious history. The Hoa Lo Prison, or the Hanoi Hilton, was despite its dark nature probably the most interesting place I visited in the city. Though the war is long over, the prison/museum is full of propaganda trying to convince viewers that the American prisoners loved it there. I had known enough about John McCain's imprisonment there during the Vietnam War to question these accounts. Though the museum walls now seemed harmless, they were just eerie enough for me to imagine the horrors of McCain's experience being dragged down the same corridors. It was more fun to imagine how Donald Trump might have fared had he not dodged the draft. 

The storied Halong Bay was next. I visited in January, way out of season, and the bright green water and clear blue skies that so many photos had hyped up were nowhere to be found. Both sky and water were generic shades of grey. I joined a two day one night cruise with an interesting cast of characters. People often ask me, "who is the craziest person you met on your trip?" I think it's difficult to uncover the depths of another's depravity until you really get to know them, which doesn't happen too much while backpacking. However on that cruise, there was an old white haired, white bearded American who probably last shaved during the Reagan administration. Upon boarding, he immediately inquired about weed, which endeared him to the younger backpackers. He soon got weird. He was in his 60's and had not been in the US in over 30 years because it was too sinful. He was a Bible Literalist, believing every single word to be divinely inspired, and actually withstood scrutiny of hypocrisy. Another American girl Brook talked about her last name Long and how cool it was that Long means Dragon in Vietnam, and that Halong itself means Descending Dragon. Bible Beard then spoke about how dragons were the flesh incarnate of the devil and how terrible it was for the Vietnamese to worship them. Talk about buzz kill. Luckily the tranquil seas and green islands of Halong Bay were fun enough overall to drown out Buzzkill Bible Beard and the grey skies.

Next up was Da Nang and Hue, and the memorable bus trip and aviation party which I've documented already. Hue was cool and palatial (Hue Forbidden City) and I could have spent more time there exploring, but instead I chose to escape the rain and drink. Da Nang might seem like a boring modern city, but I enjoyed the chance to see a functioning industrious side of Vietnam. From Da Nang it was a short ride to Hoi An, a charming old port city which had eschewed the modern commercial duties to Da Nang and emerged instead as a touristy lantern-lit ode to a historical era. I loved Hoi An and how the tight Chinese-Japanese-Vietnamese urban architecture intermeshed with the gorgeous river scene. Though the town was small, I could have wandered around those pedestrian alleyways all day. The trip was greatly supplemented by a long bike ride to the beach with a French girl I had just asked to take my picture, and another ride out from town to the Terracotta Park, a random museum with clay models of world wonders, which I had learned from Mya at the aviation party. The liberated joys of backpacking - meeting fellow travelers and finding hidden gems - reached new highs in Hoi An. 

This high was soon to crash down. Sometime on my next voyage, a 16 hour bus ride to the mountain coffee town Buon Ma Thuot, I lost my phone. I spent about 24 hours mostly feeling sad, but I fit in 5 delicious cups of coffee, observant walks through a tourist-free city economy, and a great goat meat dinner with a retired Canadian couple.

Skipping the resort city Dalat, I headed straight to Ho Chi Minh City to a new phone. I was lucky to be offered housing from Sam & Quentin Axelrod, though they were both out of town. Their US consular housing provided a pitstop of luxury, with AC, TV, gym, wifi and an immense jewelled tiger (that Sam loves and Quentin hates). I also was able to connect with some ultimate friends and a Georgetown classmate who based his startup there. I learned that Saigon, or HCMC, is a surprisingly great city for startups. For a city of its level of development and quality of life, the cost of living is bizarrely low (sidenote: its abundance of skybars are also an urban outlier). A steady local graduate corps of programmers are readily and affordably available, and several co-working spaces have sprung up to make HCMC a go-to spot for location independent workers.

I planned my days to involve at least 2 coffee outings, interspersed amongst tourist site visits. My 5 days in HCMC were chill, with sobering trips to the Cu Chi Tunnels, the War Museum, and Saigon's Chinatown. I went into the tunnels confused about how a rag tag underground (literally) bunch could beat the US army machine, but left with an idea of the terror any American soldier must have felt entering those narrow dark trap-filled death corridors. I went into the war museum prepared to deflect the Vietnamese propaganda, but left aghast and abashed. Even if the Agent Orange exhibit inside was incredibly exaggerated, the US atrocities during the war were unfathomable. I felt deep shame for my country and my ignorance of this event. The Chinatown experience was less sobering, but still war-related. I walked around District 5 and found my way into a housing estate where I heard Cantonese. In the courtyard, a pair of adjacent stalls sold dumplings and tea respectively. I sat down and awkwardly started a conversation with a 50 year old enjoying his lunch. His vernacular was odd, with an unfamiliar word to be found in every sentence. He used a formal term for a soldier's march in lieu of the verb for walking. He went on to describe how the whole area used to be in Chinese, and how 4 in 5 residents left during or after the war. I asked him why he stayed, and his calm demeanor belied the sadness of his answer. "Most of them died leaving. The Chinese people have forgotten us. Few Hong Kongers like you want to visit us. But it's ok, life is pretty good here."

The rest of my Saigon experience consisted of expensive drinks at skybars, to the extent where I nicknamed the city Skygon. My first country and main impetus for the trip surpassed my expectations. The pho, banh mi and coffee defied the laws of economics in their quality and price. The foods that hadn't been popularized worldwide, My Quang and Bun Bo Hue and Banh Xeo, rocked my world. I had tasted enough of the food and learned enough of the language that when I entered a Vietnamese restaurant in Bangkok weeks later, I felt surprisingly at home. There was never a dull moment outside either. Cars didn't own the roads and pedestrians didn't own the sidewalks. Everywhere the motorbike was king. The system seemed to be in a state of dynamic flux, never at any equilibrium but somehow never breaking down.

Strait Thuggin' It

The turn of the half decade put me in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was in a country I had long poorly understood. I was first puzzled by Malaysian Chinese in London back in 2008, where I happened upon a group of them speaking Cantonese outside a LSE party. I was quickly impressed by how fluent they were in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and presumably Malay. As someone struggling to become trilingual, I couldn't understand and how they all so effortlessly seemed to speak all those languages. I came to find many more Malay Chinese with similar polygottal aptitude, who when pressed would often say they speak many languages at home, especially Hokkien, and learned Cantonese from watching TVB. Very little of this made sense to me.

My perception of immigrant life, especially immigrant Chinese life, could not account for these Malays. Most immigrants I've met speak the language of their parents and heritage country at home, but speak the language of their current country best. Many immigrants can't speak their heritage language at all, and most lose it within 2-3 generations.  I've met many Chinese from Australia, America, Canada, Thailand, UK, France, Italy, Philippines, Côte d'Ivoire, Vietnam and Panama who fit my model. It seems simple.

Malacca town centre with red Dutch colonial buildings

But the Malaysian communities, which are also related to Singaporean and Indonesian communities, are very different and their histories are fascinating to me. For starters, they are a large group, which Chinese making up about a quarter of the population in Malaysia and the majority of Singapore. The oldest of them, called the Peranakan or Baba Nyongyan, came as early as the 1400s. Chinese communities were well established by the 1600s and many who arrived in the 1800's got rich. This period saw a great blossoming in trade as the West discovered the will and ability to sail to the East and the world changed forever. With Constantinople falling to the Ottoman Empire in 1421, the Silk Road was cut off for Europeans and the much desired silk and spices stopped showing up in the markets of Venice and Bruges. The Portuguese saw a market gap here and made big ships, reached India and established a colony in Goa. They soon realized the importance of the Malacca Straits in reaching East Asia from India. The Malacca Sultanate is considered the first Malay independent entity on the land after eras of empires of Indian or Indonesian extraction and established themselves as policers of the straits. With Europe really loving the spices, jade, silk and porcelain that these ships could bring back, a quote by the Portuguese Tomé Pires which is inscribed in the garden of the Malacca Sultan Palace: "Whoever is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."

Chinese shop houses with Straits-style architecture

So the Portuguese went ahead and conquered Malacca. That was 1521, and while their 140 year rule must have been eventful, this tale is usually abridged by mentioning that the Dutch took it over in 1640s and the British in the 1800s. The British especially had a large empire in place at this time, and they seemed to see some untapped economic potential in the resources of Malaysia. They encouraged a lot of Indians and Chinese to migrate to Malaysia, and these communities really got going. 

I read a lot of this in the book "How Trade Shaped the World." It's description of some of the major centers of trade made me pine to visit: Venice, Hormuz, Malacca, Canton (Guangzhou). I've been to three of these now in the past two years. Venice is one of the most touristy places in the world, still showing off the wealth of its ages past but no longer a vibrant economic center of trade. Guangzhou is the opposite, now a bustling metropolis but with a disappointedly paltry amount of physical history remaining to boast of its role in the Age of Discovery. I'm sitting now in Malacca, where I can see the signs of loss in the modern economy, the diluting cultural effects of tourism, but also a healthy amount of European settlement and a charming abundance of a Chinese culture no longer found in China. In Guangzhou I felt lost in the midst of what seemed like any other Chinese city, in Venice charmed but removed from the era of trade. In Malacca I can sense the melting pot history and feel connected to what seems like a much more exciting era.

The Chinese here came from many regions and in many waves. Like seemingly all Chinese diaspora, they established Chinatowns and tried to preserve their traditions more conservatively than those in China. Chinese shops are equipped with ornate signs all reading from right to left. They primarily spoke Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese and some Wu. I've met plenty of people in my generation who still claim to speak five dialects (including Mandarin) fine. All mixed together, it seems everyone could speak everything. I can envision some poor laborers in Fujian boarding a boat and ending up in a tin mine in Malaysia, working alongside lots of other Chinese men. They would have had to pick up all other dialects, which wouldn't have been too arduous over enough time. If they interacted with locals more or the authorities, they would've had to speak good Malay or English. As their children settled and an education system was standardized/imposed, they would have learned Malay and English well. Nowadays, a lot of Chinese children go to Chinese primary schools where they learn to properly read and write Mandarin (which they uniquely call 華語 Huayu). They'll also learn Malay and English from the age of 6 or so, and transition into a Malay high school because Chinese high schools are not recognized. Because English is the language of universities, those pursuing higher Ed have to keep that up. Not every Malaysian Chinese is like this, completely multilingual. My friend in Borneo doesn't speak any Chinese, and plenty of poorly educated people don't speak English. Some of my friends have admitted to struggling with Malay, particularly after years abroad.

I think the reason Malay Chinese haven't dropped their Chinese language heritage and fully adopted Malay is largely owing to the size of their community but partly because of the role of English. For us immigrants abroad, learning the local language is a prerequisite to upwards mobility. For Malaysian Chinese, a lot of high paying colonial jobs required English first, and nowadays with great English you can go abroad and study. Many of the educated elite Malay Chinese in fact speak primarily English at home. Thus Malay has been relegated to a role language, used strictly for communicating to the Malays and other ethnicities around. Cantonese, Hokkien and now Mandarin are the lingua francas within the Chinese community, Malay the lingua franca within the country, and English within the world. Depending on which communities you spend more time in, your linguistic aptitudes will adjust naturally.

I'll finish with one personal anecdote. I wandered far outside historical Melaka center, past shopping malls and seaside construction and residential neighborhoods in search of the Portuguese settlement on my map. I didn't find much there. Closely packed ranch or two floored houses with intense Christmas decorations were exhibiting an ordinary Saturday afternoon that could have just as easily taken place in North Attleboro, Massachusetts or Irvine, California. I reached the seashore finally, after the entire previous 4km stretch had been blocked by construction or industrial activity. There wasn't much here either. I was very confused, no seaside city passes up on coastal development, much less one historically known as an entrepôt. So I found a restaurant that was completely empty save for what seemed like staff and children. A brown man served me a bottle of water, while an old man and woman conversed in a Chinese language. I tried but all I could pick up were phrases that I thought were purely Mandarin or English. Finally I asked the woman if she could speak Cantonese, with an idea what the answer would be. She said, "yes, no problem la" but spoke with a fairly strong and unusual accent. She told me that they had been conversing in Hokkien, and that they spoke basically everything in their community, but qualified this statement by saying "we can speak some of everything, but all of nothing." Her Cantonese wasn't perfect, but it was communicable, kinda like mine. The guy didn't seem to fully understand us.

I asked if there were any Portuguese here. The woman explained sure, this place was setup specifically for Portuguese, from all over Malaysia in fact. I asked how many this was. 2000, 3000 about? she confirmed with the man. In fact her husband, who was moving crates around in the restaurant, was of Portuguese and Malaysian descent. He still spoke Portuguese, but she added "已經變了" meaning the Portuguese they speak has already evolved to the point of unintelligibility with Europeans. At this point the man jumped in, and explained in English the history of the settlement. Portuguese had been in Malaysia since the 1500's, and amazingly some of them were still there as a distinct entity. In 1933, the community was granted a tract of land on swampy, reclaimed land 5km from city centre. The reason this waterfront lacks much development or history is that it's not historical at all, and "there's no fish out there." The community seems so unremarkably residential belying their unique heritage were it not for the very visible Christmas celebrations still up in January. In a country where it has become controversial for Muslims to even say "Merry Christmas," the Portuguese community are known as Kristang (from Christian) and defiantly loving the Christmas spirit. 

The man reintroduced himself as Mr. Lau and said his mother was a Peranakan. I would learn from my museum visit later that the Peranakan were, as the earliest Chinese arrivals, usually the first to take advantage of the crops and trade here and become societal elites. It was no wonder that he was so well versed in the region's history and his English evidently fluent. He told me about a black house built in 1945 that was of a more original style, still made entirely of wood, and was now inhabited but also preserved by the local museum. He told me how there used to be a bell to alert people to fires and events by the statue of St. Peter. He told me he'd been to Hong Kong and how it was nice but that there were too many people.

I had never been much of a history buff growing up, but I'd never been so affected by the history of a city as I was now. When I visited the Peranakan house and museum, a 19th century two story triple house owned by a rich Peranakan family of the last name Chan, I understood the history a lot better. The original Mr. Chan had come penniless from Fujian and ended up owning a spices plantation and diversifying into rubber and fruits. The house had cool elements, including a peephole from the 2nd story bedroom to the front door, rainwater collection, furniture from England and a stone bowl for grinding spices. The family is now 5 generations descended from the original immigrant and spread throughout the English speaking world (Canada, Singapore, US, UK, Australia). As I looked at the family picture taken just a year ago, I felt like I was seeing familiar faces. How many Chinese people had I met along the way who mentioned some heritage to Malaysia that just confused me? One of them easily could have been from this family. The world was somehow making more sense now. Maybe I've done a poor job of explaining it, but this group of Malaysian Chinese that was so puzzling to me had been solved after this one trip, and that was as much as I could expect for a New Year's holiday.

Most Diverse Countries in the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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