As I am pretty occupied with the new environment and new business in China, there’s little time for me to calm down and start collecting my miscellaneous thoughts into an orderly post or two. Luckily I am honored to have John, a friend who I began to get familiar with via this blog, who offered to give a piece of his mind as a guest post on my blog.
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My journey to the HBD world.
I immigrated to a small town in the Pacific Northwest in late seventies from southern China. The population of my town was mainly white people. Though in retrospect, they were very nice and tried very hard to accept me, I felt a sense of alienation. This alienation went along with the identity politics and equality meme of the democratic party. though I was always a fiscal conservative coming from China where one does not spend money that one does not have.
It was not until I came out to California in the late nineties that opened my eye to a different world. What struck me as odd and puzzling was the division of labor along racial and ethnic lines. The Chinese and the Indians are the engineers. Whites were generally the managers. Vietnamese dominated the hair salon business. The Cambodians were big in doughnut shops. The Sikhs were taking over the hotel and taxi businesses. The other puzzle was the permanent inability of the black people to get out of the slums and the amount of coddling that was given to them by the society in large.
Being an engineer, I can’t help but observed that Asians made up a large share of the engineering staff, but few management were Asian. I initially blamed the glass ceiling for the lack of Asians in management, but then I saw other immigrant groups, such as the Persians which did much better at cracking the “glass ceiling”. The publication of the Bell Curve and the subsequent controversy opened my eye to a different dimension and a different perspective. Then I stumbled on to other HBD type blogs like isteve which opened my eyes further. For the first time, all the puzzles that I had could be explained in a coherent way. Though the HBD theory that I formed still had a lot of question marks.
After reading work by Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and others, I was able to fill most of the gaps I had on my HBD theory. At the same time, I was saddened to see that the leading civilization in our time, the West, is on a slow road to oblivion. In the U.S., the demographic trend is such that the die has already been cast. Europe is not far behind and hobbled by fragmentation and the flawed concept of a European Union. The impulse to help the weak and disadvantaged, which started off with good intentions, has now veered off into the absurd. The brutal suppression of any HBD discussions (Larry Summers, James Watson) made me realize that even in a supposedly free and democratic society, the media is incredibly managed. The truth is often sacrificed at the altar of dogma. Our public discourse given to the fears and prejudices of the masses. Given the democratic system we have in place, a spoil system along racial and sexual lines is inevitable and indeed, it is being born even as we speak. I owned some homes in the San Jose area after the prices plummeted during the housing melt down. The other day, I was renting one out, a black lady came to apply. The government is paying most of her rent. She showed up in a black late Mercedes SUV! It was worth more than the car that I drove. We are seeing people with their government food vouchers at Wholefoods buying luxury items that many hard working middle class choose to forgo, often sporting expensive handbags and such. But these kinds of scenes will be child’s play compared to the injustices that my kids will see when they started contributing to society.
I went down this road originally burdened by the weakness of my fellow Asians in America. Ironically, as I learned that Asians are not as weak as I thought, I am seeing the beginning of the end for the West, and it brings me no pleasure to find the answer that I was looking for.
Should have taken the blue pill.
the slitty eye 
The perspective of native East Asians on HBD, especially the straightforward types like John, is endlessly fascinating.
One amazing thing Asia has going for it is racism. You can have two atom bombs droped on you, go through Maoism or civil war, and you still come back. Good genes mean success is an inevitability. Bad genes mean the same for failure. Asia got racism right.
What is amazing to me is that Asians in America become race deniers. Even when you read Steve Hsu’s blog you can see the basic endorsement of cathedral leftism and the proposition nation. You could chalk all this up to simple social climbing, but its still such a dramatic shift compared to the home countries.
I am not sure if Asians in Asia is HBD aware as you mentioned. My sense is that they are not. Perhaps the leadership is more so (I know that Lee Kwan Yew is a believer, and the top Chinese leaders respect his thoughts, Don’t know if this aspect of his thoughts came across to them).
In the West, even though the body of work in this area is large and growing, it is confined to a very narrow group that seeks this information already. Like all other groups, Asians are locked into the dominant orthodoxy as much as the next guy. Like TSE, I accidentally stumbled into this stuff. I can’t even discuss this with my family and friends without the protective armor going up around them and the discussion is shut down. For most folks, Asian or not, even the first step down this direction is so painful to their core beliefs that they simply shut down any further effort and heads back to the safety of their original bubble.
It is my belief that as the demographic shift continues, these types of discussion will be more violently put down and no one will be able to voice these thoughts without paying a price personally.
While I essentially agree John, I think that asdf is talking more generally about “garden variety” racism, as compared to carefully reasoned HBD.
I currently reside in South-East China, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a Chinese person casually and innocently utter a stereotype, like “blacks are lazy” or “everyone tries to be clean and beautiful like scandinavians” or “women are scared of big ideas” (all three are real examples). It’s not based on data, it’s just that there’s no Political Correctness police to stop people from indulging in casual pattern recognition, however unfair or foolish some of it may be.