Follow up on Chiang...

More interesting dynamics from the Asian population...

I'm running the poker room all week this week, and I got to talking with the floor during a lull yesterday about the Chiang Kai Shek thing. One of the dealers heard me and chimed in from a dead spread table (open but not playing)...

"I know why those people don't know Chiang." he says. His name is Pandhe, and he is from Tibet. He speaks five languages, is unbelievably good at his job, and is always smiling and happy. The only thing that he really doesn't seem to like is Chinese people. His grasp of history is remarkable, and he is more than savvy in "current affairs" (and I mean that... he's every bit the junkie we all are). Hailing from Tibet, he really has no patience for anything Chinese... and seems particularly sensitive (seemingly) to subtle slights that we "anglos" don't pick up on routinely.

The secondary reason they might not know Chiang, he explains, is that I am pronouncing the name as it is said in Cantonese. I asked if it was wrong, and he said no... it was pretty good pronunciation... but most of the Chinese help in the joint speak only Mandarin, and Chiang's name is pronounced Jiang Jieshi (I worked hard to get it right, with Pandhe's help) in Mandarin, which is what is spoken across nearly all of northern China and all of Taiwan (Chiang's eventual native land). It is (I assume) the manner in which he would have pronounced his name himself... were he still around to say it.

However, the primary reason that the other Chinese in the casino don't know him is that he didn't know a one of them that got past the Chinese equivalent of 8th grade. He went on to explain that 90% of all the employees that hailed from China (rather than those of Chinese-American descent) were all from provinces that were unbelievably rural and unbelievably poor... and thus, schooling was almost completely optional once a basic ability to read and write was established. He also said that one of the reasons so many of them struggled to learn English (and many do... hard as they try, they really do struggle) was that they never adequately learned how to learn anything. Pandhe, for better or worse, has a really attitude towards the Chinese... something he admits readily... because he (a foreigner) can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese better than almost every native Chinese he knows.

Living this close to New York, we sometimes have Chinese-language newspapers in the break room, and Pandhe (later, on a break we shared) pointed to two supervisors looking over the paper. He looked me dead in the eye, and said: "I'll bet you your dollar to my next paycheck that neither of them can read anything other than the headlines. Go ask them." I didn't, but another friend did... and sure enough, when asked to read the caption on a photo of Qaddafi that was in the middle of a page, they couldn't tell us who the picture was because they couldn't read the caption.

I was shocked. I can't say that I am "ok" with the degree of disdain that Pandhe seems to hold all Chinese in... but he is far more aware of the cultural nuances of the people than I am, and his assessment of their abilities to "read" seems right on. If what I see now as the "educational norm" for the population of Chinese at my work is in anyway indicative of the success/failure ratio of Chinese education in general... is this really the sort of "system" that even liberal Democrats want to emulate?