I used to work at a very large (and reasonably well-educated) company that had coworkers from everywhere (LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, NYC, etc) and it was quite a common misconception amongst almost all of them (and to be fair, I also met a handful of Europeans who thought the same). Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.
> Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.
Yeah, that does not surprise me. Americans are not always that great at global geography.
I'm not sure why that is. Of course the country is huge, and American culture is such a dominant force that it is not so hard to live your entire life and never learn much (anything?) about a relatively small city-state far away in Asia. If you've never met anyone from Singapore, this doesn't surprise me at all.
It still feels like something that the US should be better at as a nation, though.
One of my Seattle coworkers was one of the specific people who I was thinking of when writing the above comment, actually.
I think it's less common now due to stuff like pictures of Marina Bay Sands going viral over the past several years, as well as movies like Crazy Rich Asians "educating" people that Singapore is a modern city. But around ~2010, not so much.
I’m still not seeing it. A lot of my generations introduction to Singapore was via articles like wired’s Disney Land with the Death Penalty (still banned in Singapore to this very day). The Singapore being apart of China is even weirder for someone who knew nothing about Singapore (why would they even know it was populated by mostly ethnic Chinese?).
You're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it?
