Native Americans. Africans. Mexicans. And now? Chinese!

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889! 

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The rule of law, my ass!

I agree with the idea of rule of law.  But, I don't believe in the rule of law as it is.  What if, as Dickens described it, the law is an ass?

Think about this: Slavery was legal for a long time.  Yes, slavery was legal.  The Constitution as it was framed did not even consider blacks to be fully human!  Will we be happy with the rule of law as it was?

The rule of law also requires a constant critical examination of what is wrong with the law.  We humans are imperfect, and the laws we craft will be imperfect.  It is up to us to make laws less imperfect.

Last spring, we watched a documentary that taught us about yet another imperfection, which remained the law for a long time.  It was about the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The details in that completely floored me.  The law not only made it illegal for Chinese to come to America, it even denied the citizenship of those who were already in America.

The rule of law is not sacrosanct because the laws can be awful.

The challenge to the law went all the way to the US Supreme Court.  In 1889, the Court upheld this law.  And was the law for six decades.

Remind me again why the rule of law is sacrosanct!

In the recently concluded hearings at the Senate regarding the nomination of brett kavanugh to the Supreme Court, Kamala Harris asked the nominee about what he meant as settled law, which kavanaugh touted often.

In the 1889 Chinese Exclusion case, the Supreme Court permitted a ban on Chinese people entering the United States. The court said Chinese people are "impossible to assimilate with our people" and said they were immigrating in numbers "approaching an invasion." This case has never been explicitly overruled. Can you tell me was the United States Supreme Court correct in holding that Chinese people could be banned from entering our country,” Harris asked.

Even to a non-law person like me, it was obvious that the question was not really about the Chinese Exclusion Act per se. So what was the question really about?

It was about trump's Muslim Ban.

Go back to that Kamala Harris question, and make the following substitutions: Muslims in place of Chinese, and 2017 in place of 1889.  It becomes deja vu all over again, right?

Should such a case go up to the Supreme Court, what would kavanaugh do?

So, what was kavanaugh's response about the 1889 ruling?

It was pathetic. Awful. Disgusting.

Watch for yourself.

Crazy rich failure

Fun fact first: Asia is home to about 60% of the world's population.  About 4.5 billion people.

Fun question: Can you generalize 4.5 billion with a word "Asian"?

Fun answer: Yes, but only here in the US!

Here in the US, one can easily shock most people by referring to, say, Iranians or Bangladeshis as Asians.  It will shock them because most Americans think only of Chinese and other Far East Asians as Asians.  The rest?  We are from shitholes, of course!

The box-office champ Crazy Rich Asians has done a lot to further reinforce this screwed up understanding.  (Nope, I haven't seen the movie, nor do I have any plans to watch it.)

The film has been "heralded as a milestone for Hollywood"

Not a single central or even auxiliary character is played by a white actor. On the few occasions when white people do feature, they flash across the screen as extras: as plane passengers or, on a giant container ship chartered for an over-the-top bachelor party, as bikini-clad beauty queens for hire.
Asian-Americans, including among the cast, hail this as a breakthrough moment in American cinema.

Well, ok.  But, that is the American perspective.  What is the reaction from Singapore, which is the locale for the movie? The film "ignores all Asians other than the Chinese kind."

One-quarter of Singapore’s population is not ethnic-Chinese, but of Malay or Indian descent. Yet when Malays feature, it is as valet-parking attendants. Indonesians are masseuses. As for the pair of Sikh guards at the Young family mansion, their buffoonish performance is as excruciating as Mickey Rooney’s as the Japanese photographer living above Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Brown bodies, writes one anonymous film-goer, were disembodied “footnotes”: mere openers of doors or cleaners of homes. “Crazy Rich Asians” is not just “money porn”, she goes on, it is also, to many South-East Asians, “othering porn”. What passes as a victory in Hollywood can look like a glaring failure in Singapore.

And, how about in China?  You know, the "Asia" that most Americans think about?

Well, the movie "may not even be released there":

Under China’s strict quota system, a limited number of foreign films are approved for import every year and some experts are skeptical about the movie’s chances. The depictions of profligate spending and vast wealth inequality in “Crazy Rich Asians,” they say, might not sit well with Chinese officials amid the country’s growing push for positive “core socialist values.”

How about the content of the movie?

Dong Ming, a Shanghai film critic, said: “Maybe the content of the film wouldn’t get censored but it’s a question of whether the film would even be popular in China.”
“Chinese people really dislike this kind of westernized Chinese culture,” he added, comparing the movie to American Chinese food staples like General Tso’s chicken and fortune cookies. “The flavor is not authentic.”

We are a crazy rich people!

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Nobody cares for what I say or write; so, I will quote myself ;)

Back in January 2015, I wrote in an op-ed:

Even the most ardent supporters of universities and higher education aren’t being helpful when the only support they show is for basketball and football victories, for which they are also willing to invest millions of dollars. Imagine, instead, that a few million dollars were invested in order to encourage students to learn Chinese and Arabic. Not that I don’t want students to, say, learn French. Au contraire! But in preparing students for the future, shouldn’t we actively promote Arabic, Mandarin and Hindi, which will then become portals to understand those different places and their peoples?

Yep, that was more than two years ago.  Over the nearly thirty months since then, don't you think that the importance of understanding the part of the world where Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi are spoken has vastly increased?

Even the British bastards knew better--in order to suck the blood out of their colonies, they knew that they needed quite a few of their own people to be fluent in the vernacular of the brown people.  And those bastards even really enjoyed the food in the colonies, unlike the current American president!

By now you know that this blogger presents logic and evidence, unlike the president and his 63 million voters,  Here too, in the case of foreign language, you can bet your farm that there is plenty of evidence that we need to worry about.  Like from the United States Government Accountability Office.  (How they managed to get such reports out under this presidency beats me!)

First, the context for the GAO report:

Proficiency in foreign languages is a key skill for U.S. diplomats to advance U.S. interests overseas. GAO has issued several reports highlighting State’s persistent foreign language shortfalls. In 2009, GAO recommended that State, to address these shortfalls, develop a strategic plan linking all of its efforts to meet its foreign language requirements. In response, in 2011 State issued its “Strategic Plan for Foreign Language Capabilities.”

In 2009.  That explains it--of course, the Kenyan Muslim Obama would be interested in foreign languages!  A real American would not care a shit about any language other than "Murican."

So, in brief, what has the GAO to report?

As of September 2016, 23 percent of overseas language-designated positions (LDP) were filled by Foreign Service officers (FSO) who did not meet the positions’ language proficiency requirements. While this represents an 8-percentage-point improvement from 2008, the Department of State (State) still faces significant language proficiency gaps

Guess where the deficiencies were the highest?  In the least important parts of the world. of course, I am being satirical!

Regionally, the greatest gaps were in the Near East (37 percent), Africa (34 percent), and South and Central Asia (31 percent).

It is not like there is anything important happening in any of those regions that we want to understand anyway, right?  Oh, wait, those are also some of the hardest languages for "Muricans" to learn?

Category I—World languages (e.g., French and Spanish)
Category II—Difficult world languages (e.g., German)
Category III—Hard languages (e.g., Russian and Urdu)
Category IV—Super-hard languages (e.g., Arabic and Chinese)
According to State documents, the time it takes to achieve general proficiency depends on the difficulty of the language. World languages require 24 to 30 weeks, difficult world languages require 36 weeks, hard languages require 44 weeks, and super-hard languages require 88 weeks to achieve general proficiency.

Oh, the harder it is, the more we want to avoid investing in learning that language.  Makes fucking sense to me.

So, you want a feel for the implications for this language gap, yes?

language proficiency gaps have, in some cases, affected State’s ability to properly adjudicate visa applications; effectively communicate with foreign audiences, address security concerns, and perform other critical diplomatic duties.

I will wrap up the post with this:

embassy managers in countries where super-hard or hard languages, such as
Arabic and Russian, are spoken said that certain positions have been designated as not requiring language proficiency or designated at a lower proficiency level to increase the likelihood of filling the positions
Managers also said that, while they would prefer to require higher levels of language proficiency, they sometimes require lower levels to avoid delaying the arrival of FSOs at posts who would otherwise have to spend longer periods in language training. Some State geographic bureau officials spoke of significant tension between quickly filling a vacant position with an officer who lacks language skills versus waiting to fill the position with an officer who is trained and fully proficient.

Oh well ... it is not like 63 million voters care about anything other than "White Christian America First."

Ni Hao!

I was perhaps eight years old, when I visited Trivandrum for the first time.  Or at least, that is my earliest memory of that city.  The buses had a red/yellow color scheme, and the lettering on them about the places seemed like art work.  I wondered how people read and wrote such stuff.

If the Malayalam script stumped me that much, you can imagine how much at a loss I was about the strange designs that were the script in the Far East.  I could not even begin to imagine how kids learnt those difficult languages.

I am now supposedly older and wiser.  But, only you blog readers know well that that the only thing that is true is that I am older.  To the rest, I pretend that I know shit.

Languages stump me all the time.  In graduate school, a new faculty member joined the same year that got there as a student.  He was a red-haired, balding, bearded white guy.  And he spoke Chinese with the students from China.  It was surreal to me.

In the life after graduate school, I interacted for a few years with another white guy, who was a few years older than me, who taught himself a few languages.  Including Swedish!  He would chat with the visiting Swedes in their language.  On every occasion, I always asked the visitors if his Swedish was ok.  They always said he was fluent, though his accent came across to them.

This Swedish-speaking white American was married to an immigrant from Hong Kong.  No, not an British immigrant, but a Chinese.  I asked the friend whether he learnt Chinese from his wife.  He said he tried, but it was too damn difficult for him.  Difficult for a guy who had taught himself a few languages!

Thus, when the NY Times reports about the passing away of the man who "made writing Chinese as simple as ABC," it more than intrigued me--despite that other news--to read that report.

Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.

I have no idea what Pinyin means, or what Romanized Chinese writing means either.  Ignorant I am, and shall always be.

Adopted by China in 1958, Pinyin was designed not to replace the tens of thousands of traditional characters with which Chinese is written, but as an orthographic pry bar to afford passage into the labyrinthine world of those characters.
Since then, Pinyin (the name can be translated as “spelled sounds”) has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.

I see Chinese students typing a gazillion words a second on their smartphones.  Would not have been possible without Zhou Youguang's contributions.

It took Mr. Zhou and his colleagues three years to develop Pinyin, but the most striking thing about his involvement was that he was neither a linguist nor a lexicographer but an economist, recently returned to China from Wall Street.
But because of a fortuitous meeting at midcentury, and a lifetime love of language, he was conscripted by the Chinese government to develop an accessible alphabetic writing system.

How interesting!  The crazy, twisted, path that life is, eh!

Knowing that linguistics was a hobby of Mr. Zhou’s, Zhou Enlai drafted him to come to Beijing and lead the committee. Mr. Zhou’s protests that he was a mere amateur were to no avail.
“Everyone is an amateur,” he was told.

That was Chou Enlai, when I was growing up, in the pre-Pinyin era.

“Pinyin is not to replace Chinese characters; it is a help to Chinese characters,” Mr. Zhou explained in the interview with The Guardian. “Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear.”
As a result, illiteracy remained rampant throughout China well into the 20th century — affecting, by some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the population.

What a wonderful contribution to humanity!  And to think that I never knew about Zhou Youguang until today; as the demagogue would tweet, "sad!"

Oh, and Trivandrum is now Thiruvananthapuram.

On seeing a Chinese guy in Kanchipuram!

After visiting Mahabalipuram for the first time in my life, I was all the more convinced that I ought to visit the old temple structures in Kanchipuram.  Which is what I did.

As one who doesn't care for any religion-based explanations for where everything came from and what happens after we die, my interest in this old town with a gazillion temples is in its history, art, and architecture.

Thus, I was especially interested in two old temples that are now under the care of the government's archeology folks: Kaliasanathar Temple, and Vaikuntha Perumal Temple.

The two have been decommissioned, so to say, to borrow from the modern technological vocabulary. Believers no longer go to these because the main and ancillary idols have been uninstalled. Non-patronage, therefore, creates maintenance problems different from those resulting from huge numbers showing up.  As the driver who took me there remarked, "only foreigners come here, sir."

Anyway, one of these days, the nerd in me will read up and get a clearer idea of when this was built with respect to the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram.

Why is this important?  Because ... 

... Even to the art-challenged me, it was evident that the sculpture styles are so similar at this temple, at Kailasanathar Temple, and Shore Temple. It was, therefore, a wonderful pleasure, when the archeology department employee, who doubled up as a guide for an informal fee, pointed out the following on the wall:

The guide said it shows the Pallava king on the left celebrating, and the Shore Temple on the right.

I asked him which king it was, but he pretended that he didn't hear me.  When students pretend they didn't hear me in the classroom, I repeat the question all over again; here, I chose not to :)

The carvings and frescoes will, I am sure, have recorded a lot about the major events during those years.  There are quite a few inscriptions in the old Tamil script.  I am not sure how much have of those treasures have been appropriately documented and studied.

As I tried to keep up with the guide's show-and-tell, I realized how difficult it was for me to absorb them all.  I wished he would slow down. To take his time in sharing with me whatever he knew.

Meanwhile, another foreigner came in.  The driver was right on the money!

So, we backtracked a tad for her to catch-up with whatever I had seen by then.

Poor woman; she struggled even more than me because (a) the guide's accent made it very difficult, and (b) she was unfamiliar with the content.

Anyway, after a while, we were now two tourists trying to keep up with this guide.  I asked her where she was visiting from. "Perth." And then after a very slight pause, "Australia."

I was reminded that Australian tourists--and from Perth, to boot--marked my own vacation beginnings.  And then my brother's visit.  I wonder where else, and how many more, Aussies are going to pop up over the rest of the travels here.

The guide then stopped and dramatically pointed at something.  We also looked.

"A Chinese man came to the Pallava court" said the guide.

See the Chinese guy on the left side of this panel?  How awesome!  1,300-plus years ago, a guy from China comes all the way to this southern part of south India and becomes a part of the history. 

It was a small world even back then, and it is rapidly getting smaller and smaller and smaller ...

Map of the day: the wanderers

The Economist notes:

MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent.

As a wanderer myself, I am all the more excited with this discussion.  Plus, it is not the first time I have blogged about the wandering humans--like this one, for instance.

The future population thanks to globalization :-)

America: emigration, not immigration?

Over to Michael Arceneaux:

Many African immigrants are returning back to their respective home countries.

While we are accustomed to viewing dreary depictions of Africa, those there are becoming quite comfortable with their living situations.

Recent studies by the Pew Research Center show people’s level of satisfaction with their quality of life has risen all across the continent of Africa.

By contrast, attitudes for Americans have remained stagnant if not decreased.

Between that and a sense of optimism about the future of individual African countries’ economies, and it’s clear why some Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, and others have decided they’d rather deal with an unstable internet connection than an unstable nation.

Joining them are Chinese and Indian natives who no longer feel they have to leave their respective home countries to get ahead.

Even many Mexican immigrants have started to flee the country due to our sour economy.

America has long been known as the country where anything as possible.

The entire world has looked to us as a beacon of hope of what could be. One of American’s greatest strengths is that it’s become a melting pot of the world.

What does it say about the future of this country if those who came here with a sense of optimism are now leaving with a newfound distrust in the American promise?

Asian Immigrants should "Americanize" names? WTF?

As the LA Times correspondent notes, speechless we are:

Republican Betty Brown said this week she thinks Americans of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent should change their names to make it easier for poll workers to identify them.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the comment came late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting because they may have a legal trans-literated name and then a common English name used on driver’s licenses or school registrations.

Brown, who with her husband Ron operates a ranch near Terrell on land that has been in her family for four generations, suggested that Asian Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible. She said:

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? ... Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?

No word on how Ko responded. Perhaps, like us, he was speechless.