All Asians Are Alike/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Non-Asians confusing the ethnicities of Asians.

  • Straight: Bob cannot tell Lee the Chinese and Nakamura the Japanese apart.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Bob often confuses his best friend Lee with random Asian guys.
    • A show has multiple Asian characters all played by the same actor.
  • Downplayed:
    • Bob can't tell Lee and Nakamura apart, but he can distinguish Prawit the Thai.
    • Bob can tell Lee and Nakamura apart, but can't distinguish between Lee the Chinese American and Li the China Chinese.
  • Justified:
    • Bob came from an isolated community with little Asian contact.
    • The reverse problem - Bob comes from a hyper-cosmopolitan city where the Asian immigrants have extensively intermarried and blended their cultures together, and is therefore confused when meeting tourists from the old countries who continue to insist on drawing lines between each other.
  • Inverted: Ang, a Chinese, cannot tell the difference between Jack the Englishman and Jacques the Frenchman.
  • Subverted: Bob can easily tell the two apart, but was just pretending he couldn't.
  • Double Subverted: ...But it turns out to be a lucky guess, and he really still can't tell them apart.
  • Parodied:
  • Deconstructed: Bob's inability gets him in trouble with ultranationalists and ethnic gangs who think he's mocking them.
  • Reconstructed: But then see Bob going out of his way to actually learn about them and give it a pass.
  • Zig Zagged: Sometimes Bob can tell them apart, sometimes he cannot.
  • Averted:
    • Bob can differentiate between Asian ethnicities.
    • No Asian characters appear.
  • Enforced: "Talking about differences in Asian cultures might confuse viewers. Let's just have one Asian to represent everyone."
  • Lampshaded: "I can't tell what race you are!"
  • Invoked: Lee uses Bob's obtuse inability to differentiate between Asian ethnicities to press the Berserk Button of Nakamura, who is constantly fed up with this trope, with the hope that a good punch from the Japanese guy helps Bob grow of it.
  • Exploited:
    • In the face of anti-Chinese sentiment, Lee pretends to be Japanese.
    • In a spy fiction, Chinese, North Korean or Vietnamese agents pretend to be Japanese to deceive American counterintelligence.
  • Defied: Bob does his research to avoid making this sort of mistake again.
  • Discussed: "And of course, there comes the white person that cannot tell a Thai person from a Korean and cannot differentiate sushi from fried rice, as if they hadn't enough stereotypes of racists already in this film"
  • Conversed:

Lee: Bro, why can't Bob distinguish between Asian folk? He confused me for you for the third time this week! We aren't even that similar looking!
Nakamura: Well, it's not like I can differentiate between white people either!

  • Played For Laughs:
    • Lee and Nakamura use Bob's inability to distinguish between them to prank him repeatedly.
    • Bob is put in charge of guiding a visiting Korean boy band, and he not only confuses their nationality but the members themselves, even when they all have very different outfits, hair colors and even body shapes, confusing the poor artists who think it's a prank from their manager and just play along.
  • Played For Drama:
    • A World War II drama where Chinese immigrants to America have to contend with racism due to being constantly mistaken as Japanese.
    • Lee gets harassed by Loan Sharks that Nakamura owes money to because of their inability to tell the two apart.

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