statistics

Stats are some of the most interesting things ever. As business people one comes to rely on statistics for everything, to show profits, how the business is doing, how much it is making, how much it is selling, almost literally every small bit of information. But for anthropologists we learn not to trust statistics. The percent of foreigners in a given area. First of all any statistic can be manipulated to show what one wants to show. Want to state that the city of Dalian, china has very few foreigners? Simply define the word foreigner as someone who has never owned the land there or who doesn't have any ancestors there. By doing so you determine the number of foreigners by only the expats that live there from outside east Asia. All Japanese, whether or not they have ever lived there before wouldn't be considered foreigners because Dalian used to be a part of Japan. Same with all Russians. Similarly compare the population of china with that of the USA. You will get an outcome that china is x percent larger than the USA. However this percent doesn't take into consideration any of the illegal immigrants who haven't been counted, nor does it take into account all the people in china born to one parent and thus have no identification in china and not considered Chinese at all statistically. But anthropologically they are still there, they exist and haven't gone anywhere.

Arrogant and Chinese

So I suppose I'm a little arrogant. But then again isn't everyone? I have absolutely no problem for people telling me what to do in areas that I clearly don't know anything about (or clearly know much less than those around me at least). Architecture? Please, teach me, I beg you. Flags? Know very little. Business? Again with the same. But don't come up to me and know something clearly less than I do and try to teach me about it. That's ridiculous. Yesterday I had a woman trying to show off how much she knew about using the internet in China. Hmmm .... wrong thing to show off around me. It's like someone trying to teach me how to live in China. If I had never been there that would be great, I would probably welcome the opportunity to learn. But I lived there three years and this woman hadn't even been there a semester. Give me a break.

Anyways, so much for my arrogance. Many people don't understand two things about me, both related to Chinese but in indirect ways. One people don't understand when I say that my Chinese class is hard for me. "You know Chinese why should it be hard?" Yes, I can speak every day Chinese but that means little to nothing in terms of learning how to write and read Chinese and even with speaking if you sat me down to watch a news broadcast (in Chinese) the probability that I would understand is very little. The second thing people don't understand is why I'm learning Japanese. Believe it or not I'm learning Japanese to help with my Chinese (among other reasons). Japanese has at least three different writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (also Romanji and a few others that aren't "as important"). Kanji comes from old Chinese, it's literally old Chinese characters. Some of these are still used in today's Chinese but some aren't. So the ones that are used in today's Chinese I can learn and the others will be helpful if I have to read historical texts in Chinese. Most anthropologists or people who study Japanese and Chinese know this but the every day person doesn't tend to.