All Asians Are Alike/Playing With

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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:
  • Lee and Nakamura look ridiculously obviously Chinese and Japanese respectively, but even then Bob cannot tell them apart.
  • Lee and Nakamura are actually identical.
  • Lee and Nakamura can't tell each other apart.
• 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: ???
• Exploited: In the face of anti-Chinese sentiment, Lee pretends to be Japanese.
• Defied: Bob does his research to avoid making this sort of mistake again.
• Discussed:
• Conversed: ???
• Played For Laughs: ???
• 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.

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