After spending hours going over paperwork, I was ready to sign the lease of my new San Francisco apartment. The property owners, Bill and Virginia, a delightful Caucasian couple well into their 80s, were just about the nicest and sweet couple you’d ever meet. As we wrapped up, Bill walked us out the apartment and as we approached the the top of the driveway, Bill stopped and asked me and my six-foot-tall Chinese house mates:

Bill: I met a lot of Chinese people in the past.

[As soon as I heard Chinese, I thought: Here it comes, Bill's 81-year old ass, after decades of tumultuous race relations is going to drop the chink bomb]

Bill: How did you three get so tall? Everyone else I know is tiny.

Me: It’s the milk…

Bill didn’t mean any offense, but it lead me to think: Yeah! Why are Asian’s so short?

In the story of creation, it’s not like Asians landed on double-zero in a game of height roulette. After all, whether you’re Yellow, Black, White or Brown we all share the same lineage. When our Homo Erectus ancestors left Africa, it’s not like the tall ones decided to go to Europe and the short ones to Asia. Instead, the reason is most likely due to the environmental and human encounters to follow.

Cases for natural selection as illustrated by the Peppered Moth lend credence that we are the products of our environment. The black peppered moth, commonly found in England, thrived at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. As factories and industry rose in England, the ensuing pollution led to a biological advantage for dark colored moths which were now camoflouged from predators. The natural advantage, or ‘selection’ eventually allowed dark colored moths to flourish throughout industrial England.

So what’s unique about the Asian environment that could explain the vast difference in average Asian heights?

YouTube blogger DeStorm (I could have cited an academic, but where’s the fun? His take is at the 5:35 in the YouTube video below) posits that the reason African-Americans being bigger, faster and stronger is rooted from some Darwinian aftereffects of slavery. Plantation owners and slave owners needed slaves for heavy labor, so therefore drove the demand for stronger, faster, and bigger slaves to work the plantations.

As for Caucasians? Scandinavians are just about the tallest peoples I can think of. From the little bit of European history I know, the Viking invasions and conquests in Continental Europe meant that these tall and strong Vikings intermixed and intermingled with the rest of Europe as their conquests brought them  in contact with the natives of modern England, -France, -Germany and -Russia and spreading their tallness throughout Europe for centuries to come.

What’s up with the Asians then? When you look at the last 5,000 of Asian history, Asia was neither invaded by giants nor practiced any institution (like American slavery) that instilled eugenic side-effects for height. Instead, Asia maintains a long and agriculturalist history. And what did Asians farm? Rice! While a staple in the world’s food supply, when compared to cereal crop’s oat and wheat native to Europe, rice pales in comparison in the amount of protein  per serving. Protein, a crucial compound in biological growth, isn’t as rich in rice as other cereals.

Ultimately, the reason why Asians are shorter boils down to two environmental factors. First, Asian’s just never intermixed with any taller peoples (at least not until the yellow fever epidemic ). Second, Asia’s farming history and dependence on rice meant that Asian’s took in, on average, less protein than any other peoples. Sure, every now and then, you get an outlier like Yao Ming but I’m speaking in general here. But as to why I’m tall? It’s the milk

If you have a completely different theory, please feel free to voice your opinion freely in the comments.

First of all, please let me apologize for the occasional “Asian Dating” or “Find an Asian bride” type ads on this website’s sidebar. I get annoyed of them too.

The reason these ads continue to show up is because Google’s Adsense program (Content Network for advertisers) targets and serves ads based on the content on any given page. Since all I do here is rant about Asian-American societal matters, Google picks up my frequent use of terms such as Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc… and then sells advertising space for pages related to these themes to advertisers. Anyway, I digress…

Onto Yellow Fever…

As I review the large number of dating/bride-services advertisers that continue to target this site, I can’t help but think that this growing list of advertisers is only indicative of the overall growth in Yellow Fever amongst Americans. Everyone is going after Asian women these days. As an Asian male, sure, I noticed a disparaging amount of white guys that date Asian girls.

But I never actually took the time to think about which way causality was for this phenomenon. Is it that white guys like to pursue Asian girls? Or is it Asian girls that like to pursue white guys. Obviously with the coining of Yellow Fever as a commonly accepted phrase to describe the former, I actually think we should revisit this assumption.

I recently came across a  London School of Economics study, that finds supports against an actual Yellow Fever phenomenon amongst white guys:

We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. Men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices. (Full article)

“Men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating.” I so want to disagree, but I can’t. Toushe London Fancy Pants School of Economics, I’ll give you this round.

After reading the article and the study, I realized this whole time what yellow fever actually was. We Asian-Americans coined the term Yellow Fever. Caucasians coined Yellow Peril in the 19th century to incite fear of massive Asian immigration to the US, and now we Asian-American males just did the same with Yellow Fever to incite fear that Asian women our vanishing. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison (bad things never happened to people because of “Yellow Fever”), but I just like to make analogies.

But you know what, let’s put an end to this yellow fever mumbo jumbo. Because well, as it turns out, it’s all a figment of our imaginations.

Appendix

And if you’re curious, here’s the list of sites I’ve already blocked. I advise you to not check any of these sites out

Whether you admit it or not, being raised in America, we all know the racial stereotypes that have traversed through our colorful history. For Asian Americans, we are all good at math right? It’s a stereotype, but a good stereotype right? Despite my frequent ramblings, political correctness concerns me little. Instead, I am interested in the roots and explanations to social phenomenon that we humans, out of ignorance, simplify with racial stereotypes.

What do people really think about the Asians-good-at-math stereotype? Oh, I know, it’s because they’re smarter. Well, no, if we accept Asians are good at math because Asians are smarter, we fall into the same whirlpool of ignorance the Conquistadors used to justify their dominance over Meso-Americans or 19th century American slave owners who believed African slaves could only become civilized through hard work. Fortunately, Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, has shed some light on the Asian math stereotype.

First, what we know. American grade school students have always trailed continental Asia in math. Some claim Asian students are better because they spend more hours in school. But comparing school systems fails to account for Asian-American success. Asians in America go through the same education system yet in the 2003 SAT exam, Asian-Americans averaged 575 in Math while White’s averaged 534, American Indian’s 482, Hispanics 464, and African Americans at 426.

So if it’s not the schools, what accounts for Asians succeeding in math across different education systems? As English speakers, we may be unaware, but the English language is perhaps the most odd and irrational language around. Particularly with numbers, in English, after ten the teens each have an unique name and each tenth following that gets their own name. In fact, one would need to learn 28 unique words to count up to 100 in English while in any Chinese dialect, Japanese, or Korean, one only needs to learn 11 – one through ten and one hundred.

In Asian languages like Chinese, numbers after ten follow a precise logic. Eleven in Mandarin is shi yi or ten-one, twelve is ten-two, thirteen is ten-three, and so forth. When we get to fifty-nine, the logic continues, five-ten-nine. Five tens and a nine, 59. The internal logic in counting numbers with Asian languages results in kids who speak Asian languages are able to count beyond a hundred before English speakers can even count to 40. But the Asian language advantage doesn’t stop in counting. Remember those dreaded fractions? In English we would read 3/4 as three-fourths. But for languages like Chinese, 3/4 is literally translated, “out of 4 parts, take 3″.

When you think how much more sense math makes for Asian-language speakers and considering how many frustrated 3rd graders go home with there hands crossed because multiplication doesn’t make sense. How much fun would math had been if it did make sense? Wouldn’t you do more homework? In turn wouldn’t you pick up new concepts – in which case math heavily depends on learning piece by piece – easier. Quite simply,

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among western children starts in the third and fourth grade, [...] perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. . .

And as a child, you’re not discouraged at math, it’s likely you’ll continue to take math classes growing up and continuing to do homework because it just all makes sense.

While extensive study on languages affect on math, Gladwell’s assertions shed light away from simplistic racial explanations for which I personally rejoice over.

I consider myself a cool-headed guy. You could accidentally spill juice on my clothes, run over my big toe with your Buick, and hey, no biggie, I won’t get mad. But culturally insensitive actions, that’s a different beast and what grinds my gears.

Tevez Celebrates After Scoring

Manchester United, England’s pride and joy football team (depending who you ask), star striker Carlos Tevez decided it was a great idea to imitate the much controversial Asian slanted eye gesture from this summer’s Olympics after scoring a goal earlier this week. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Spanish Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams posed for a newspaper advertisement where each player pulled the side of their eyes back to imitate the stereotypical Asian slanted eye motion. The advertisement only showed in Spain, but received worldwide attention as a blatant insult to the Olympics’ Chinese hosts.

The Spanish team eventually issued a public apology, but for the most part, had no idea why what they did was wrong:

“We did it because we thought it was going to be something nice, something with no problem,” Calderon [Toronto Raptors Point Guard] told Yahoo! Sports. “But somebody wants to talk about it. It is too much of a big deal with you guys (the media) and everybody talking about that.”

Head coach Aíto García Reneses didn’t get it, either. Reneses comes from an older generation of Spanish society, one which has little time for the politically correct niceties of the modern world.

“If I go to play with a taller team and I put here (raising up on the tips of his toes) it is not an offense,” Reneses said. “I can’t understand anything more.”

But Gasol [Los Angeles Lakers Power Forward] got it. He didn’t get it when the Spanish courier company persuaded the players to pose with their index fingers stretching their eyes to a thin slit at a team media day, but he sure as heck gets it now.

“Some of us didn’t feel comfortable doing it just because to me it was a little clownish for our part to be doing that,” Gasol said. “But the sponsors insisted and insisted. I think it is just a bad idea I guess to do that, but it was never intended to be offensive or racist against anybody.

“I didn’t find it very funny. I didn’t find it offensive, either. I guess some guys didn’t mind. To me I don’t want to be that way, I guess, to be doing that stuff.

“If anybody feels offended by it we totally apologize for it. We never meant anything offensive by it.”

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/Story?id=5563668&page=1

Okay fine, sure, Spain doesn’t exactly see why certain acts are disrespectful, or maybe even racist, or that such acts creates any kind of offense whatsoever. I can see that. But is Spain some island isolated and sheltered from the world next to Easter island that has had no experience with any of this past millenia’s cultural clashes? Or is Spain the same country that in the same year, (1) launched Columbus’ voyage that eventually led to the annihilation of 95% of the world’s Native Americans, and (2), launched a 300-year religious inquisition within Spanish borders to seize wealth from Jews and Muslims. Yes Columbus and the Spanish Inquisition all started in the same year, 1492. Someone please explain to me of any unnecessary political niceties please.

Okay, I digress, and I apologise.

Since the Spanish Basketball team fiasco, less than a year passed and here we go again. Carlos Tevez, Argentina native and worldwide (I mean everywhere but America) star soccer player for whatever reason, thought it would be nice to revive the summer controversy. Tevez, in the past, has mentioned wanting to play for a Spain football club, perhaps thought the gesture was the proper homage to re-enforce his message to the Spaniards.

2008 Spain Men's Olympic Basketball Team

2008 Spain Women's Olympic Basketball Team

Well screw all that. I’m glad I’m an American, where our professional sports team don’t tolerate culturally insensitive indignation. Despite America’s past and what people may think, most parts of America are progressive and moving towards acceptance of all peoples no matter creed nor color. Sure America still maintains various forms of it’s racial past and racism is alive and well, but compared to the world, America is far ahead on the road of progress.

For one thing, the media, owners, and the public don’t tolerate insensitive actions from professional athletes. As the Brits and Europe paid little mind to Tevez’s gesture, we at least slap our players on the wrist. In March of 2001,  the Sacramento Kings visited the Golden State Warriors, a few Asian fans heckled Kings point guard Jason Williams to the point where he lashed back, shouting “Do you remember the Vietnam War? I’ll kill ya’ll just like that,” proceeding to simulate firing a machine gun.

The Sacramento Kings responded by fining Jason $15,000 and had him issue a public apology.