Whenever I read US publications referring to Asia, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they forget about countries other than China and Japan. Sometimes they include South Korea but often they leave out Southeast Asia where more than 600 million people live, or South Asia in which India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and their neighboring countries are home to more than one and a half billion people.

What they often refer to as Asia is actually no more than East Asia. The center of Asia? That’s around Azerbaijan.

Why does it bother me? Because I live in Southeast Asia and apparently we Southeast Asians don’t count. 

When an article talks about Yahoo selling off its Asian assets, most of the time they mean Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, not Yahoo Southeast Asia which is based in Singapore.

When somebody talks about Apple’s Asian operation, that’s their Foxconn factories. Apple’s Asian market? China and Japan. Apple South Asia, headquartered in Singapore, which covers South and Southeast Asian markets, isn’t even in the radar of these bloggers and journalists.

Why do they do it then? Laziness. They assume people would immediately link those East Asian countries to the points they’re trying to make because apparently in the grander scheme of things, Asian operations outside those countries don’t matter. Rather than be correct, they’d rather be lazy. Why? Because it’s more work. It’s four more letters to type every time.