Jozi

I'm heading home after a week in Johannesburg. Being here made me realize how much of a bubble living in Hong Kong is - the luxuries, the freedom, the safety, the living standards, the cosmopolitanism. To be fair, I did not get a fair view of Jozi or South Africa since I basically spent all my time between hotel, office and law firm office - which all happen to be on one street - but my impression from this trip is that Johannesburg is what you would get if you combined the climate/terrain/architecture of Northern California with the history of segregation and demographics of Atlanta. It feels SO much like America, except that the white people speak with funny British/Dutch/Afrikaans accents (no two South Africans seem to have the same accent, some are more British sounding, some are more Dutch sounding, but they all say "yeah" as "jyah") and the black people speak with other varying accents which I can't put my finger on, and it is a very racialized place (obviously). Whereas in the US it's almost become faux pas to recognize that people have different skin color (unless you're an African American comedian), here they seem to talk about it all the time. In fact, it is even institutionalized in their governmental and business sectors through an affirmative action program called Black Economic Empowerment which basically gives companies scores based on how many owners, managers, customers and suppliers are black. As a business, having a good BEE score is extremely important and in order to do so, you need to have a certain percentage of black South African owners and employees.

Also, I learned interestingly enough that during apartheid, Chinese people were categorized as "Black" while Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese people were categorized as "White." More thoughts on this later, have to board my plane.