The Misconception of Asia
When we see this map, we just see borders and countries names of the Asian continent. However the biggest misconception that the West has perceived is that not everyone from a certain country are the same ethnic identity, nor speak the same languages, or share the same religions. Just because people live in Thailand, Vietnam or China, does not automatically mean that they are ethnically Thai, Vietnamese, or Chinese.
Rather it’s diverse and complicated as this map here below:
This map of Indonesia is almost over the distance of Los Angeles to New York City! And that is going through different various languages, ethnic groups, dialects and even accents.
Simply driving an hour away from one village to another village, you will meet people who speak a totally different dialect or language, different clothing, or practicing different faiths from the village you were just at. That’s like going from San Francisco to San Jose in an hours drive away.
History of the word “Asia”:
Asia or “Orients” was a term used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans to basically give this broad generalizing terms to anything that was east of their empire, and essentially considered the “Orient” or “East” as ‘erotic’ and ‘culturally’ different than that of Europe during that time, that continues to be reinforced and taught in many schools, despite never having being updated since the BCE era. Asia to this day is simply just a Western geographical labeling term, that truly discards the hundreds of thousands of ethnic groups, languages, dialects, cultures and many religions in Asia.
Regional Borders:
“Asia” has a long history of conquering and expanding empires (The Chinese, Persians, Indians, Japanese, Arabs, etc.). But however, it was European colonization that actually created the borders of almost all of Asia. From how the shape of Saudi Arabia looks like, to the Dutch and British deciding which is Malaysia and which is Indonesia, to the Spanish takeover of naming and creating the Philippines, to the British colonization of the Indian Subcontinent.
The national geographical borders of today Thailand was never even created by the Thai, but instead, Burma and Malaysia were colonized by the British, and the French colonized Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and thus creating the shape of Thailand today. This resulted in leaving almost millions of ethnic Burmese, Malaysians, Cambodians, Laotians and multiple ethnic groups inside Thailand to this day. Just look how messy it is when you decide to diversify Indochina by languages and ethnicity.
How should we reclassify Asia?
By categorizing them by common languages, ethnicity and cultures, instead of political “national” borders. We must understand that “Asia” itself has thousands of cultures, but do have a common ethnic and linguistic root, that can trace and group them into different categories.
