Linspirational or Linevitable?

The Jeremy Lin story has been all the rage these past few weeks, and as a Chinese-American basketball fan who loves puns and whose brother went to Harvard, it's been a story that's resonated with me on so many levels. I've read a lot of other people's opinions on him but haven't seen anyone write any of the major sentiments that I feel.  The major angles that I've seen on him are: wow where did this kid come from? Why wasn't he given a chance before this? Is it because he's Asian? Would he still be a good story if he wasn't Asian? Why are we making such a big deal about his race? Has this story revealed society's intolerant attitude towards Asian-Americans?  Can he and Melo co-exist and lead the Knicks deep into the playoffs?  How is he similar or different to Tim Tebow?

In Hong Kong and China, angles have also included what country will he represent? Taiwan? USA? Could he have ever made it as a basketball player in China? (spoiler alert: no) Is his whole existence a defiance of the Chinese athletic system?

For starters, some people are saying it would be a big story whether he was black, white or green.  False.  It would be a big sports story if he was black or white. It would be a big alien story if he was green.  The case in point is Ryan Fitzgerald, the former Harvard quarterback drafted in the 7th round and led the Bills to a very strong start this past NFL season.  His story was well-publicized while he was playing well and for a while it seemed like he may have become a well-known personality.  However his story was strictly a sports story and never crossed over into popular culture.  Jeremy Lin's story coming out of Harvard undrafted is very similar and would have been a sports story, especially since he's reviving a marquee franchise in the New York Knicks, but the entire reason Linsanity has blown up and crossed so far into popular culture that he's the subject of the opening SNL skit is because he's Asian-American.

We've simply never seen an Asian-American like this in the NBA.  Forget the NBA actually, we've never seen an Asian-American like this in any major American sport.  Trust me, I've kept track over the years. There was Michelle Kwan in figure skating, Apolo Anton Ohno (halfie) in speed skating, Michael Chang in tennis, Paul Kariya (halfie) in hockey, Hines Ward (halfie) in football, Dat Nguyen in football, Brian Ching in soccer, Kurt Suzuki in baseball, the Ting twins who played secondary for USC football, and Timmy Chang the Hawaii quarterback are the most famous ones I can remember from this generation.  And how many of those have you heard of? Sorry but I'm not including Tiger Woods in that list.  With Asian athletes, you can throw in Ichiro and Yao Ming certainly.  Their impacts were huge but very different.  They came from far off countries we didn't fully understand, and thus were objects of marvel and curiosity rather than a topic of societal re-evaluation.  Jeremy Lin is by far the most famous name on the list of Asian-Americans and has sparked by far the most dialogue.  Part of it is that he's playing in a sport that requires elite size and athleticism and perceived to be closed to Asian-Americans.  Part of it is that he's not just crossed a barrier, he's hurdled it and left it in the dust.  Remember, Yao Ming wasn't the first Chinese in the NBA - he was preceded by Mengke Bateer and Wang Zhizhi. If you haven't heard of those people that's good, it means you're a normal human being instead of an Asian sports fanatic.  But it seems that such is the normal track required to break barriers. Someone needs to lay the foundation first. Rosa Parks had to sit so that MLK could walk so that Obama could run. These things take time.  Jeremy Lin last year became the first Taiwanese-American to play in the NBA, and essentially the first Asian-American of the modern era.  This year he became the first Asian American to score 25 points, to notch 10 assists, to hit a game-winning 3, to score 30 points, to register 5 steals, to be on the opening story on SportsCenter etc.  You could argue that Yao Ming set the stage for Jeremy Lin to succeed, but that's completely false.

The Chinese experience and the Chinese-American experience have as much in common as a puma does with a domestic cat (not that one or the other is a puma...).  Even more different were the particular experiences of these two athletes.  Yao Ming was developed by a nation who wanted a sports star. He was destined to be tall and trained for his entire life to become a basketball player.  He came into the league as a skilled center with the support of his entire country and soon won the admiration of his host country. Jeremy Lin grew up in a nation where nobody like him becomes a sports star.  Yao was probably told a thousand times that he'd be the first Chinese star in the NBA.  Lin was probably told a thousand times that he'd never make it to the NBA and that he should quit wasting his time.  This was probably reinforced after he got into Harvard, where starring on the varsity basketball team could easily have been something that would look good on his resume after he graduated and started applying to real jobs. He was probably told many times to get realistic, that he was Asian and he wasn't going to be an NBA star.  Jeremy must have had so much faith in God, confidence in himself and so much love for the game to have kept his dream alive.  And now that he's reached his dream, Asian-American kids all over can somewhat realistically dream to be like him, if not Yao Ming.

I first learned about Jeremy Lin when he was a sophomore at Harvard. A graduate from my high school, Dan McGeary, made his way onto the Harvard squad that year and I occasionally checked their box scores to see what he was up to. I found his last name listed alongside some guy named Lin. Lin? Was he Chinese? Really? I thought to myself, wow Harvard would have an Asian basketball player.  Turns out he was their top scorer and had had quite a successful high school career.  Pretty cool - by this point he was already the most successful Asian-American basketball player I'd ever been aware of. I kept following him intermittently throughout his career. His senior year was a good one, where he made highlights by hitting a ridiculous buzzer-beating three while getting fouled to beat William & Mary, then play great games in losses against UConn, Georgetown (hell yeah) and Boston College. I realized he was legit and would have a real chance to make the NBA.  When he got signed by Golden State, this made ripples among my Asian-American basketball friends. I believed then that he was good enough to be in the NBA, but that he'd been signed because he was a Bay Area kid who'd bring in a ton of Asian fans.  I bet you NBA executives considered themselves very liberal for believing that this kid deserved to be the NBA despite being Asian.  At the same time, they never figured he'd actually significantly help them win games. He was a competent guy they could throw in 5-10 minutes a game and not feel embarrassed in doing so.

It's that kind of racial prejudice that I think Jeremy really had to battle, and has probably been a major factor in why there was no Asian professional baller before now.  The media has been highlighting the racial slurs that Lin occasionally encountered on the floor, everything from "sweet and sour pork!" to the C-word.  But while those are inflammatory, they are temporary blows. Those racists are obviously ignorant and hateful, easily vilified and dismissed. Far more influential are the offhand comments that compassionate liberal people make that unintentionally limits what Asian-Americans feel they can do. It's the way people take for granted that Asians are supposed to be good at math and maybe not so good at sports. It's the way people think they can make casual racial jokes about Asian-Americans because they don't perceive there to be a history of institutional oppression against Asians in this country as there has been against blacks, and because they perceive Asians to be doing fine socioeconomically.  There's a lot of reasons for this attitude, which I discussed here, and while it isn't the worst issue facing the world at the moment, it still isn't right. The Jeremy Lin bonanza has alerted the America media to one issue, whether or not Asians and Asian jokes are held to different standards, sparked by Jason Whitlock's stupid twitter post and a douchebag of an ESPN.com employee (for the record, I don't think the news anchor meant anything insulting, and he didn't need to be suspended). There is a lot that I can say on this topic (and a lot that I have said) but I think we can agree that much of the American public could learn more about Asian-Americans. Anyway Jeremy had to progress through his career constantly as an oddity and the source of countless jokes. He would have had to match each joke with a bucket, work extra hard to overwhelm teammates, coaches and scouts skeptical that an Asian could succeed in basketball. Is it any surprise that he's developed such swag, confidently calling his own play and pulling up for the game-winning 3 at the end of the Toronto game?

In truth, I believe the impact of genetics is considerably overrated.  They obviously exist, otherwise the average male height in China (5'6") wouldn't be so much lower than in Denmark (5'11"). But genetics are complicated, and some phenotypes that we try to assign to genes such as intelligence and athleticism, are WAY too complicated to be so simply understood.  In addition, the genetic diversity of perceived "races" like Han Chinese are dramatically underplayed. But if genetics is less tied to athletic success than we think it is, and genetics less tied to race than we think it is, then how do you explain the relative homogeneity of these leagues, especially the NBA?  I think that is instead a testament to the incredible power of culture and the environment in which we grow up.  While natural talent is often easy to see in sports, it only manifests itself after proper training. After all, a great predictor for a country's Olympic medal performance is its GDP.  It really should be less of a surprise that there is a 6'3" athletic Taiwanese-American guard in the NBA but that it took so long.

In short Jeremy Lin is precisely one example of what I truly believe the world needs (my post on this). We needed someone like him to show that a typical Chinese-American can become an NBA star, that Chinese-Americans are not intrinsically unathletic.  And we need others like him. South Asians are perhaps even more unrepresented on the American sports scene, which should surprise everyone in HKUPA who has been skied by Rumi. We need more people attempting to do things they previously thought impossible, until future generations have to study history to understand the meaning of the word "stereotype."

As to his reception here, if anything it's being underplayed. People think it's cool, but the NBA isn't as huge in Hong Kong and I don't think people understand the situation well enough to know how amazing it is. My coworkers are very impressed by his Harvard economics degree and his finishing moves but only a few are closely following him.  From what I hear, he's unsurprisingly a much more fervent topic in Taiwan, and many people automatically assume he'll represent Chinese Taipei in international competitions.  I expect he will as well, but not before trying as best as he can to represent USA.  As a Chinese-American likely to represent Hong Kong in the World Ultimate this year, representing the US is a no brainer if you can make the team. I obviously have absolutely zero chance of making the US team. Lin has a slight one.  Chinese Taipei has already offered him a spot on the team, so I'm assuming they can work out citizenship requirements.

In the People's Republic of China, I read that his rise is also crazily admired, but not without raising a few questions.  I'm sure government officials wished Lin had more ties to mainland China, but as an American born to Taiwanese immigrants and a fervent Christian, it is unclear how Lin's success will help spread Chinese influence or improve Chinese athletics. Furthermore, his entire life story is completely counter to that of any successful Chinese athlete.  A creative unorthodox point guard who attended to his studies and graduated from university, Lin has little in common with the giants who are identified by the PRC at a young age and plucked away from their homes into training centers and molded into basketball players.  As far as I see it, China is incapable of producing a Jeremy Lin.

All in all I think this story of Jeremy Lin, still in its infant stage, is an amazing one. He is a special, balanced person and I pray that he remains that way. It is useless to deny that his story is amazing in large part due to his race.  Far more useful is to ask why his race matters so much, and what we have to do until it doesn't.

Singapore

In Hong Kong, Chinese New Year's is the biggest holiday and we get 3 days off as public holiday. That's nothing though, compared to mainland China where most people get 2 full weeks off and the trains are famously packed. I took advantage of the days off and flew to Singapore, where they also celebrate CNY and get 2 days free. I had been to Singapore apparently when I was 12, but remember nothing about the trip other than being terrified of getting caught for chewing gum and getting caned. My second cousin Parissa lives there now and we always have an awesome time when we hang out, and so I went. It seriously may have been one of the best short trips of my life, rivaling the German-Prague-Krakow trek.

Things didn't start off smoothly. I booked Jetstar Asia, one of the cheapest airlines out here. The ticket price was already hiked for Chinese New Year, but I booked super early flights to get decent deals.  Jetstar is one of those sneaky airlines though who charge for everything, including your seat, and any checked luggage. In addition, all carry-on was limited to 10kg, COMBINED, which I was unaware of.  The charge was about $15 USD, PER KILOGRAM overweight.  My options were restricted to paying $1000 HKD for the weight charge, or $350 HKD to check my luggage.  Not happy.  I also didn't do my research and didn't learn what the Singapore exchange rate was before I got there. Unwilling to use the money changers or atms at the airport, I needed to find a cab that would take credit card, and the first one didn't. A second guy then came up to me speaking with a very mild Singlish accent and offered his luxury cab. He told me it'd be a bit more expensive, and offered 45 as an estimate, and not knowing what that meant, I took it.  Turns out the exchange rate is $1 USD = $1.27 SGD.  Whoops, I was expecting much higher.

No worries though, this is a vacation right. The driver turned out to have an incredible life story, having spent most of his life as a high-end cook.  He was Singaporean Chinese, as are most people, and spoke just about every Chinese dialect I could think of.  It turns out the Chinese community in Singapore is extremely unique.  Large communities of Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Hainanese make up most of the city. Back when my driver was growing up, kids would bounce around from group to group and pick up most of the dialects. My driver was Hakka but picked up all of them, and then spent time working in Shanghai.  An interesting note is that now Singaporean Chinese all learn Mandarin (originally a Northern dialect) and write in Simplified, even though all those groups are Southern dialects and Simplified Chinese is purely an invention of the PRC. Singapore has consciously decided to try to align itself with China and has thus tried to limit the dialects and promote Mandarin/Simplified. Anyway my chef driver speaks 6 freaking dialects and though I obviously couldn't test them all, his Cantonese was better than mine. He had also lived and worked in England, Canada and Australia, cooking Indonesian food but quite 7 years ago because it was high stress. He said holidays were the worst because you never get them off and instead usually have to work more. Anyway, that's not the point of this blog post, but it was a memorable cab ride and how often do you remember cab rides?

View from the top of Marina Bay Sands

Parissa lives in a nice ground floor level condo about a 5 minute ride from city center.  Uncharacteristically, I did unjustifiably little research before this trip (I would not recommend anyone travel to a country without knowing the exchange rate) and on the taxi ride to her place I passed by a giant ship resting on top of 3 building blocks, and I almost gasped audibly. What is that? It's the Marina Bay Sands, my kind multi-Chingual driver told me.  It's a super swanky hotel built within the last two years, worth checking out the view from the top. And so I would.  If you don't know what this building is, Google Image search it now.  I have too many other awesome photos I want to share. I'll wait.

Parissa took me to a mall nearby to get money, and I was immediately stunned. What was it? Oh, I could walk along in the mall and stretch my arms out. After coming from the intensely dense Hong Kong, it felt refreshing to be in a city with elbow room. It soon became apparent to me how little I knew about Singapore, despite having read a dozen wikipedia articles on it. I knew about the 4 official languages, English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, and that it is the only modern state to become sovereign against its own wishes, and had friends from Singapore and heard the Singlish accent.  I figured that as an Asian city state, it would have a ton in common with Hong Kong, its fellow Asian Tiger.  While it may share some important similarities, coming from Hong Kong I noticed far more differences.

When you come from mainland China onto Hong Kong island, your world is immediately westernized.  I had kinda assumed that Hong Kong was the most western city in Asia, which is after all, the Far East and not very western at all.  Compared to Singapore though, Hong Kong may as well be Zhejiang.  Singapore was still definitely an Asian city, but from the sidewalks to the building lobbies to the brands, Western influence had left a strong unapologetic impact on the feel of the city. Even if people weren't speaking English and the signs were in Thai, my western-raised being would still have sensed familiarity in the surroundings.  That mall surprised me. In that warm climate, sections seemed straight out of California, while other times I noticed distinctively Asian stores and Chinese dried goodies.  As I saw more of the city, I realized how insane the quality of life was.  The downtown area was as nice as any urban area I'd ever seen, almost overflowing with money in the form of architecture, but the rest of the city that I saw was just as nice and clean, if more modest.  Growing up in the US, we are raised to believe that we are blessed with the best environment the world has to offer. After all, people left Europe, Asia, and all other parts of the world to come create our country.  Living in Beijing, I experienced by contrast what quality of life really means and the difference it can make.  But I had always assumed that American cities rated highest in "quality of life." Now I realize how incredibly wrong I was.  The quality of life I saw in Singapore is higher than any American city, and a 2011 Mercer survey agrees with me. American cities are almost all plagued by relatively high worldwide levels of crime and at least some bad neighborhoods.  They're also not known for efficient transportation or being particularly clean.  Singapore ranks 25 on the list (#1 in Asia), and has low crime, super clean streets, a decent subway and little overcrowding.

Everyone in Hong Kong had in fact told me similar facts, either immediately before or after stating that it was such a boring place.  The Lion City's less official nicknames include "The World's Only Shopping Mall with a Seat on the UN" and "Disneyland with the Death Penalty." But I didn't see it that way at all. After the excursion through the shopping mall, Parissa took me to a restaurant right by her place that sells Prata (delicious bread of Indian origin) for a few bucks. It'd be the first of amazing meals that I'd eat there.  From there, we journeyed crosstown and met up with many of her who were at a Chinese restaurant celebrating the Chinese New Year.  Singaporean (and Malaysian) Chinese have this bizarre tradition of ringing in the new year called Lo Hei or Yusheng, which is definitely not common in other parts of the Sinosphere.  They gather a bunch of noodles, carrots, spices, other random Chinese food ingredients and overlay it with smoked salmon and tons of sauces.  Then the fun begins and participants dig their chopsticks into the bunch and throw it up as high as they can to mix them, and create a giant mess.  Every ingredient is supposed to have some great meaning (generally a Chinese pun) but to me it was just silly fun.

We dropped by afterward to a bar in a neat part of town called Emerald Hill, where the bar scene was pretty standardly fun from what I've experienced, except that drinks were outrageously priced. The cheapest beers were $15 SGD, due to an absurdly high sin tax.  The Singaporean government is one that believes it can regulate morality, from its alcohol tax, to its $100 gambling fee for all Singaporean citizens at local casinos (foreigners can lose money for free), and caning the bare butts of severe lawbreakers. It probably works well for some people, and not so well for others. We weren't at Emerald Hill for too long though because Parissa's boyfriend Mike somehow managed to get us into Ku De Ta, one of the top clubs in all of Singapore, located at the top of Marina Bay Sands.  The way this opportunity rolled around was convoluted, and I had absolutely no idea how it all worked at the time. Both Parissa and Mike are very active in the Bowdoin community in Asia, and a fellow alum was attending the Booth School of Business in Singapore.  This alum and his classmates were all high rolling MBA students who liked to live the lifestyle of investment bankers, and thus rolled into Ku De Ta and ordered bottles - a few weeks ago.  They couldn't finish all of them, and the club allowed them to keep them there for a month.  Well somehow this gang wasn't in Singapore for the rest of the month, except for this one weekend.  So they needed to finish all the bottles for good this Friday night, and called Mike and other alum for help.  Mike enlisted me and Parissa as well and somehow we strut into Ku De Ta without paying the $38 (!) cover charge (the cover suggests that a bottle of Goose could have been four digits, so ordering the 12 or so bottles that they did is absurd beyond belief). But even more absurd was that this guy apparently hung out with his buddies for an hour, decided this place was lame, grabbed one bottle of goose and bounced, his MBA friends in stroll.  I don't think I ever even met him.  3 other Bowdoin guys were left and I kept thinking one of them had to be the kind benefactor, so I kept over-graciously thanking them.  Turns out we were all freeriding and had 4 or 5 bottles of Grey Goose and Macallan's to finish. Somehow we did, but it was challenging towards the end.  Mike decided he really wanted to get me a girl, and before I could object he rolled up to a pair of dancing girls and introduced me.  Soon I was semi-willingly embroiled in the game while Parissa looked on, half-amused and half-amazed that this was how men operated in clubs. We closed out the place at 4am, and I remember having my first real conversation with the girls and then bidding them farewell.  Heading back to the Bowdoin guys, one guy named Big Will came at me and said, "Cal, go back there and just grab that girl and say, 'Let's go.' "  "Let's go?"  "Let's go.  It's a game-changer."  Parissa laughed her head off and asked me, "Do you need my place tonight?" Mike looked me and nodded vigorously.  The absurdity of the situation really overwhelmed me. I did not make that move but I learned a lot that night.

Parissa and I woke up around noon, struggling mightily. Were the liquor not so fine the previous night, it would have a more difficult struggle. We ventured to a mall by her office for lunch where I tried "Laksa," another Malaysian Chinese invention that is part coconut milk, part wonton soup, part curry broth. It was delicious but definitely not the right food for me after a 4am night of clubbing. Afterward we strolled through the downtown area, called Orchard, which I found to be as upscale a downtown as I'd ever seen in the world. The buildings were sleek and awesome, the walk was very comfortable despite the heat, and we came across an old-fashioned Singaporean "ice cream sandwich" which literally was a rectangular ice cream bar wrapped in a slice of bread.

From there we took the MRT towards Marina Bay to see the Singapore's famous Stone Lion. I didn't know much about Singapore but I remembered the lion and how its supposed to be the mythical animal of the city. Apparently people take a picture where it looks like they're drinking from the lion. I did one of those and also took a quick shower.  This part of town seemed to be an older part, with the cool-looking suspension Cavenagh Bridge (built in 1867 and has a sign preventing cattle and horses from crossing) and colonial-style houses along the river.  For the most part, colonial architecture is rare in Singapore, as well as in Hong Kong.

From the Lion we walked all the way around the bay and back to the Marina Bay Sands and I checked out the gigantic mall underneath.  I realized that the complex was actually a casino property, developed by the same people who own the Venetian in Las Vegas and Macau.  The underground mall also features a canal system, an ice skating rink, museum exhibits, the casino, and piles of pure gold coins that you can jump into and swim in like you're Scrooge McDuck. Ok one of those I made up.  But it was seriously one of the most lavish and over-the-top developments I've ever seen, and as it turns out my company had a hand in its award-winning design.  But anyway we paid to go to the observation deck at the top of the hotel, where I got to see a lot more of the city in daylight.  It was drizzling a bit and all the other tourists stood under a roofed area away from the edge, but Parissa and I didn't care at all and walked around to our freedom.  The city skyline was decently impressing - certainly no Hong Kong but I found it interesting how the city was both so well-developed and growing.  Those two adjectives had previously to me seemed mutually exclusive. The skyline also includes the Helix Bridge, a pedestrian bridge crossing a part of the bay with a twisting spiral facade shaped like DNA. I have a random semi-intense interest in cool bridges, but sadly I didn't get a chance to walk across this fine molecular structure.

Malay food quickly being destroyed

That night ended up being a lengthy one.  Parissa and I had Malaysian dinner ordered by her delightful and bubbly Malay best friend Aisyah, along with international friends Shaad, Cian and Brendan.  Malay food has long been one of my favorite cuisines, despite the fact that it was limited to occasional trips to the chain restaurant Penang in east coast cities. Their food has a ton of influence from Indian and Chinese cuisines. Our dinner included delicious chicken in a curry sauce, samosas, and these amazing potato wedges.

From there Parissa and I ventured to a house party at a swanky apartment overlooking the Marina Bay, where fireworks would be launched for Chinese New Year that night.  The party was one of the classiest I'd ever been too, thrown and attended primarily by older more successful people, and even included more Lo Hei.  One 30 year old banker was stunned to discover our true ages a few hours in, and kept repeating, "you're 23?!?!"  Like many ex-pat parties in Asia, I met a lot of very cool international people and had a fantastic time, topped by a spectacular view of the fireworks. Mike and I were also very conscious of the Patriots game (AFC championship against the Ravens) which would be starting at 4:30am Singapore time.  He had started his day with a destructive champagne breakfast and bowed out at midnight, promising to wake up in a few hours and meet up for the game.  Aisyah, Parissa and I left the party at around 2am, where I mentioned how fun the night was and that I was ready to powernap. They were like ok we'll drop you off at home and then go clubbing.  I closed my eyes, drifted off for a second, then opened them wide and exclaimed, "no you're not.  I'm going clubbing with you."  And so we went to Clarke Quay, a normally hopping ex-pat clubbing area, where I determined to pull an epic all nighter.  The place was almost all dead though because of the holiday, except for one club that was charging a $25 cover.  We skipped along and went to another club, which said they were closing.  The bouncer there told Parissa however that he could stamp us and that we could get into the previous club free.  Parissa and Aisyah were skeptical and worried incessantly that we were being punked, but I went ahead without shame.  The other club's bouncer was dealing with a girl pleading him to let her in, and I walked right up and showed him the stamp.  The bouncer said to the girl, "Now why don't you have a stamp like me?" and opened the ropes for me.  I turned back to the two girls and winked.  However, they ran into a load of trouble when they tried to pull my move, as the bouncer quizzed them on where they got that stamp.  Turns out he was likely just giving them a hard time to amuse himself, and they eventually got in.

At 4 o'clock we bounced and headed to a bar, where Parissa's friend Chase knew the bartender.  He had convinced the man to open up the place at that ungodly hour and put the game on.  Only 3 of us were there to watch, not including Mike who did not budge through his alarm or several phone calls. The game was the first Pats game I'd watched live in Asia, and it was terrific to get that familiar routine back in my life, albeit at an unfamiliar time slot. When Billy Cundiff missed that easy field goal to put the Patriots in the Super Bowl and to cause me to shriek in surprise, it was close to 7:30am. It was a pretty fantastic way to start the new year.

I think that Monday consisted of a great Western brunch and then dinner in Little India at a fantastic Northern Indian restaurant.  After downing a few pounds of lamb chicken and naan bread, Mike asked me if it was the best Indian meal I'd ever had.  I easily put it in my top five, although some of the meals I had in Real India were pretty amazing too.  We walked around that area for a while, where I bought a coconut and drank its milk, and felt a very different urban vibe from the Western/Chinese parts of Singapore.  Little India isn't too far a walk from Arab street, another cross-national avenue of hooka smoke, Arabic signs and coffee shops that don't sell pork or alcohol. After 2 straight absurdly long nights, this was a chill break. Parissa and her friends planned to go to Johor Bahru, the Malaysian city right across the border from Singapore, the next day for a day of cultural exploration and bumper cars.

The next morning, my last full day, however we discovered that just about everything in JB was closed and decided not to go. Cian (who had already arrived at our scheduled meeting spot), Shaad, Aisyah, Parissa and I restructured our plans and ventured via ferry to a nearby island. The island proved to be a nice walk, had surprisingly lovely beaches (considering how much shipping goes into Singapore), and a coconut that proved to be a very good substitute for a football.  We trekked through the jungle (it felt oddly like Jurassic Park) and came across a large ultraquick lizard and argued about whether it was a Komodo Dragon (it wasn't). The afternoon included lunch at Newton Centre, presumably named after the city where I grew up, where I had some awesome Hokkien prawn.

That night we met up with Annabel, a former Georgetown acquaintance whom I became friends with recently when she was working in Hong Kong, and whom I thought would get along really with Parissa. I think I was correct.  I also thought that there might be a chance that Gabe Albert would come by.  Gabe is the older and bolder brother of my senior year roommate Jordan and when I posted my arrival to Singapore on Facebook, asked me how long I'd be there. Though he was based in New York, he and two other friends whom I had previously met were taking an epic tour through Southeast Asia.  We figured out he'd be getting in late on Tuesday, the night before I was leaving, and I left him a message with where we were going and hoped for the best.  Turns out they got in at around 10 on a bus from Kuala Lumpur, came straight to the place we were, walked around for 15 minutes looking for me, thought they found me, called my name like 10 times and were about to give up when I heard and turned around.  That night, though by far the briefest of all my nights in Singapore, drinking wine with Parissa, Annabel, Gabe, Marisol and Bobby was both incredibly random and incredible special and a small microcosm of why my life on this continent is so great.

Ultimately I had an amazing four day trip to Singapore. I left with a very positive impression of the city as a tourist, though I'm not ready to make a fully informed opinion of the country as a whole.  It certainly looks like a pristine problem-free nation from the surface, with racial diversity rivaling that of any global city and exceeding that of any other nation. However it's not a place of great civil liberties and has firmly engrained racial prejudices. It's education system seems top-notch and it's economy blossoming, but the city and its citizens seem to have little to offer of the arts and sports. Perhaps, it is possible that the life in Singapore is too nice.

World athlete

I can't believe I haven't written about ultimate here yet. I've only written twice since I've moved to Hong Kong, which is pretty bad, but ultimate has been an immense part of my life here - more than it ever was in the states, which is hard to believe. Ultimate was only a part of my social life in the states, where I had friends from all sorts of school-related activities and other places.  Upon landing here, I really didn't have any friends right away and so I found the ultimate community right away, which is a great way to make 30-40 quick friends.  Ultimate on this continent is so great in so many ways, which might go counter to your expectations if you knew a little bit about ultimate.  After all, it is an American sport and many, many more people play it in the states.  In addition, unless you live in downtown Manhattan, field space is easier to get in virtually every American city than in Hong Kong, or most Asian cities. Even though it is very much a fringe sport, it's still relatively well known (at least people have somewhat heard of it) and it's  relatively easy to find a league or pickup. The top teams are extremely competitive, to the extent where I don't think an athlete like me could possibly make an elite club team.

In Asia, the obscurity of the sport serves to make the sport more fun, not less.  Spread by Americans, ultimate has invaded the rest of the world in some predictable ways.  Countries with strong US connections, like the UK and Australia, have very strong ultimate programs.  The top nations read somewhat like a G-8 summit, with Japan, Italy, Germany and Sweden also in the mix.  Locally, the community seems to be about 60% ex-pats (a lot of Canadians) and 40% local Hong Kong players, though quite a few of those have experience abroad.  The result is an interesting, diverse player base with vastly different experiences. However total, there are less than 200 active players here. The ultimate experience, which is a mixture of athletic and social everywhere you go, definitely leans more towards social in Asia.  A lot of this is because of the numbers - it's easier to get to know everyone that plays ultimate in the entire city. When you aren't playing against different strangers every week, you tend to become closer to your opponents.  In addition, for the ex-pat community, it is a chance to meet a lot of people also undergoing your similar experience, with a hobby in common to boot.  One surprising thing I discovered was that many of the ex-pat ultimate players learned to play in Asia, and not from their home countries like me.  They found the community here through friends and really clicked with it.  Even many more were just casual players back in North America but more serious here.

Teams here are weird and not exactly set.  There are many tournaments throughout Asia over the year, in places like Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Jeju, Hanoi etc. Individuals decide on their own what tournaments they can attend, and then teams are formed based on the people who go.  Amazingly, you will see many of the same people from all over Asia at all these tournaments. Some former Asian ex-pats who have now moved home, often plan their vacations to return to Asia around these tournaments, playing in them with their old friends.  It's quite a scene.  You will see many teams of friends living in disparate cities who assemble at tournaments and form a team that has never practiced together.  Some of these teams not only compete but win tournaments.  In more casual tournaments in the US, this isn't entirely unheard of, but it's certainly rare.  The US tournament scene in addition is dominated by the club championship series.  Most club tournaments early in the season are opportunities for strong clubs to get experience playing together and to train for sectionals/regionals/nationals.  These are teams with tryouts, practices and identities.  Many teams here just have jerseys.

There is also the National Team scene.  In the US this doesn't enter the conversation very much, because the US is the best country in the world at ultimate. To make the team, you have to be absurdly great.  I've seen a lot of great players but I'm not sure any of them will be on the US team to World's 2012 in Sakai, Japan. Here in Asia, there are many countries, all theoretically with national teams, and a wide disparity in the talent between them. There are also relatively strict eligibility rules, limiting the number of foreigners a national team can have.  In Hong Kong, to be an eligible local, you don't need to have a HK passport (which I don't have), just a ID card with 3 stars (which I do have).  So through some very friendly rules, I was eligible for the Hong Kong National Team.  Though I'm still very much an average player in the states, a marginal club level handler, here I'm one of the best males.  I was one of the players selected to represent Hong Kong in the Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

The AOUC occurred from Dec 1-4, and had an open (men's) division and a mixed division.  The countries in the open division were India, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. In the mixed division we had Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and Japan.  If you're surprised at the number of teams present, you should be. In all my time playing ultimate I've never been to a tournament with less than 8 teams - the average college tournament I went to had at least 24 open teams. With only 4 opponents, we played everyone twice. I think organizers were disappointed with the turnout, which was not an improvement over the exact same tournament held in 2007.  Traveling for this tournament is difficult and expensive, especially for the many countries in the region with a low GDP or visa restrictions.  Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines could have competed very well at this tournament, but probably could not afford to attend.  China had meant to send 2 teams but its players could not get visas. We even had a player who was born in Guangdong province, who though had been in Hong Kong for over 7 years, could not get his visa processed.  Only a first world country like Australia could send a team on 8 hour flights. Incidentally, this was India's first time at the tournament, but they were woefully underprepared.  The team did not have cleats and barely had forehands.  They scored 1 point all tournament.

At this point I will shift from informative to the old Cal travel diary story-telling style.  It should be a different blog post but no one reads this anyway.

I couldn't make the Thursday games because of work vacation time restrictions. So I flew in on my own Thursday night with the intention of playing Friday and Saturday, still with the opportunity to play all our opponents.  I was very excited all day, unable to sit still at the office.  However early in the day I got an email from DragonAir saying that my 7pm flight had been moved to 9:55pm due to "operational reasons."  I'd be getting into Kaohsiung after 11, which wasn't terrible but not ideal.  Whatever.  At the same time I'd been having difficulties with my phone. My American iPhone had been unlocked, but the unlocking was no longer working no matter how many times I repeated the procedure. My Uncle Andrew, who apparently travels with at least 4 cell phones, had given me his 2 year old spare and so I put my pin into that one.  However, some point in the last 2 years, the phone's touch screen had gone haywire and it now reacted terribly. I could not type at all and half the time I pressed anything, it made a call. I also could not turn it off without taking out the battery.  So I'm extremely frustrated with all this phone stuff, but I throw it all in my bag and worry about it later - after all I'm going to a foreign country where I won't have service anyways. I Google our lodgings in Taiwan - the Kindness Hotel, and check it out on a map and write down its name in Chinese.  I wrote down the number, I saw that it wasn't too far from the airport and near a subway, etc.

DragonAir website said my 7 o'clock flight was cancelled.  I had been under the impression that it was delayed.  Still I had the email saying I was on the 9:55 one, so I hoped for the best and went to the airport early.  I had walked all the way down to the subway and was waiting for the cars when I realized I didn't have my cleat bag.  Absolute necessity.  Went back up and got it.  Whatever.  The subway trip to the airport took about 45 minutes including 2 annoying but manageable transfers. Airport security however had issue with my nail clipping scissors, which are important for ultimate tournaments.  Whatever, they're really blunt, but I'm here early so I'll go back and check them in.  Second time through security and emptying my pockets and laptop, they check my backpack again.  This time they discovered a mysterious sharp object in my bag. For the life of me I didn't know what it was.  They went through all my stuff before finding this thing I use to remove my studs in my cleats.  Completely harmless.  Sigh.  In a very pissy mood, I put all my clothes back into my backpack and glared at security.

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo all the way through the flight and hopped out in Taiwan, excited to be in a new country for the first time in over a year.  After picking up my cleats, I confidently walked out to get a taxi, ready to pump out some Mandarin.  However after telling the taxi driver where I want to go, he looks at what I've written down, pauses for a minute, and then finally starts driving.  We're on the road for about 10 minutes when I happen to see a sign for the hotel on the side of the highway.  We keep driving though, and I get suspicious that this driver is trying to cheat me.  We drive another 10 minutes before I get uncomfortable and say I think we've gone too far.  We insists that we're going to the right way, to Kindness Hotel.  I tell him the address that I've written down and ask him what district we're in.  He's like "Huh? I thought we were going to this place." Oh you're kidding me.  He tells me there are like six Kindness Hotels in Kaohsiung.  Crap.  I order him to turn around and go to that street.  Very conscious of how tired and frustrated I am, the drive back to 福德街 seems to take forever.  He gets to the street and asks, "What now?"  I'm like "huh? Take me to no. 22."  At every street intersection he turns around to ask me what to do next.  At one point I snapped and said "THIS IS MY FIRST TIME IN TAIWAN! YOU'RE FROM HERE! YOU'RE THE TAXI DRIVER. YOU TAKE ME THERE."  I can't remember the last time I was this mad.

There was nothing at 22 FuDe street.  It was a completely empty narrow alley.  The driver turns around like "I told you so."  He told me there was a Kindness Hotel 4 blocks away, and I was like great! take me there.  We get there and I can't wait to get out.  I'd been very observantly watching the meter this whole time and it said 35.0.  I didn't know a thing about Taiwanese money or prices, just that it was less than Hong Kong, so I threw him a 100 dollar bill. He responded that it was actually $350, and with the airport fee, $400.  You've got to be kidding me.  This sounded like a lot - I didn't know then that this was about $10 USD.  I didn't want to argue though so I just gave him the cash and ran away.  I go straight to the concierge in a huff and say, "Room 715 please."  They respond at me with blank stares and say, "we don't have a room 715." What?? I show them my booking information, complete with the address and telephone number of the Kindness Hotel.  They tell me that I'm not at the right Kindness Hotel - there were 13 in total.  At that I threw my cleats bag on the ground as hard as I could.  They figured out which hotel I should have been at from the phone number, called me a cab and told the driver where to go.  At this point it was 12:20am.

Somewhere along the cab ride I started freaking out.  I had gotten my information about the hotel from Google - I had no idea at the time that there were 13 places with the same name. Everything I wrote down could have been inaccurate, including the phone number.  There was a chance I had copied the phone number from the tournament website, in which case it would be correct, but I wasn't sure.  I had no working phone, the only thing I could do was go to reception and ask to use the computer. I mentally readied myself to arrive at the wrong hotel and to get set for another half hour or so before I could sleep.  However, right when I landed and opened my taxi door, I heard someone exclaim, "Cal!" I looked up and saw my teammate Mary, and my goodness she could have been a vision of Mary mother of God at that moment.

Luck had it that our first game was at 10 and I had plenty of time to sleep.  I quickly noticed that, purely in terms of facilities, this would be unlike any tournament I had ever been to.  Nearly every tournament I'd ever been to, my team had driven up in crowded cars and stayed 6 to a room in some crappy motel, and played very early in the morning in some fields in the middle of nowhere. Here, we stayed at a 4 star-hotel, usually 3 to a room. The showers had separate soap and shampoo for men and women - we also had a bathtub.  The breakfast buffet consisted of more than bagels and frozen hard-boiled eggs, but instead had offerings ranging from toast to tofu, congee to cereal to ice cream.  Yes, ice cream with cereal.

All games were held at 3 stadia spread out over the city, including the Kaohsiung National Stadium which was built for the 2009 World Games.  I missed out on my chance to play there, which is a pretty special place with a dragon weaving design that hearkens to the Bird's Nest.  We had buses shuttling us to our venues.  It was a little weird, a little cool, playing in these giant stadiums with tons of empty seats surrounding us.  After the games, Taiwanese food was catered to us, which certainly beat the bananas and peanut butter bagels I was used to stateside.

 Host Taiwan was our first opponent.  Ultimate had caught on strong in Taiwan and the organization there took this tournament very seriously. Talent wise, the team was only slightly better than us, but they had played together A LOT more. Supposedly the team was composed largely of a university team, and they had been required to take 2 weeks off together and basically go to a training camp for the tournament.  Unheard of.  That makes a huge difference in ultimate, especially in Asia where tournaments often consist of pickup teams playing together for the first time.  After giving Taiwan a hard fight for the first half, our star Calvin left to fly back to Hong Kong for a work event.  We got rolled pretty good in the second half. We were never at full strength for the rest of the tournament, steadily dropping players.  

Australia is another regional power, predictable from its English-speaking ties to the US.  They had assembled their team by broadcasting a call for people capable of attending to put their names into a hat. A committee had then selected the players based on what they knew of them, getting input from people in different regions.  There were no tryouts.  The process, which I actually think was really good, created a team of mostly older players who could afford to take a vacation to Taiwan, and included two players, Kwang in Guangzhou and Sarz in Shenzhen, who were located in China.  They didn't play with great chemistry, but with a lot of veteran experience, they came together during the weekend.  They had some very talented females who were able to huck to each other over all the men for scores.  They beat us pretty good too.

Singapore was the one team we should have beat.  This Asian city-state is even smaller than our Asian city-state and has a Westerner dominated frisbee scene.  Still they managed to put together a talented young team with lots of athleticism and players willing to play defense. They made a lot of mistakes though and we went up 4-0 on them right away. Since we had lost by 3 the previous game, we needed to win by 4 to surpass Singapore in the standings. We were in position to do so at 9-6 when soft cap blew.  We scored to make it 10-6, game to 11.  When they made it 10-7, we knew that we had to win this next point.  Unfortunately we didn't catch a pull that ended deep in our end zone, and ended up turning the disc right on the goal line.  Just like that our dreams were squashed.  10-8 then became 10-9.  That point seemed to have been played out entirely within 20 yard of their end zone but through several blunders and a dropped layout by me, we failed to score.  On universe point, we drove right down to the end zone before dropping it.  They turned around and hucked it, and all I could do was stare as a lucky breeze blew the disc away from our defender into a Singaporean player in the end zone to win the game.  That was among the worst losses I have experienced.

The Japan team played us right after that.  It was my first time ever seeing the legendary Japanese players in person. Japan is a preeminent world power, with their top club team Buzz Bullets routinely beating the best American clubs and winning worlds.   With the upcoming 2012 worlds in Osaka, I think Japan should be favored.  They are renown almost mystically in the US for a disciplined, unorthodox style of play.  All of this was on display when we played them. Unfortunately we got rolled so hard (17-3) that I didn't even really get to see their full performance, but they were certainly impressive.  The team never relented, keeping great form even when there was no need for it.  A wide open Japanese cutter caught the disc at full speed, stopped and threw a low release flick just inches above the ground, with absolutely no one on her.  This was one of the better teams I had ever seen - the other tournament teams would have lost to most good club teams in the US.

Linguistic Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Whole New World / Hong Kong 101

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

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

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

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


HONG KONG 101 - as requested by Kerry Burke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiculturalism in the world

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

Too much confusion - bring back Confucian!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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