Asia is huuuuuuge.

Astoundingly huge.

Like, “can’t fit the whole continent into my browser in Google Earth” huge.

Like, one border is in arctic Russia and its opposite is in tropical Indonesia huge.

Asia is both the largest and most populous continent on Earth. In land mass, it’s six times larger than Europe and 6 million square miles larger than Africa. Asia houses 60% of the world’s population. Sixty percent of the Earth!

Three out of every five human beings on the planet live in Asia!

OK. So we know it’s huge and we know some of the countries.

Japan is Asia. And China is Asia. And Korea and Thailand and Vietnam. Americans generally present these countries as primary examples of the concept of Asia.This makes sense, partially because America raises its children to be intellectually lazy and love easy generalizations and partially because these countries are all a part of the “East Asian Cultural Sphere” or “Sinosphere”.

But technically, Iraq is Asia.

And so is Afghanistan. It’s in the most populous and most densely populated region of the world, known as South Asia.

Y’all. We’re currently in two forgotten wars in Asia.

(Why can I say this in 2017?? Why do I have deja vu from my mama’s era right now??)

You know what else?

Caucasians — actual Caucasians, as in people from the Caucus Mountains — are Asian.

Most of the world is Asian.

Yet Asian-Americans are “minorities”.

It’s pretty wild.