For context, I was in Jaipur for a short vacation and saw plenty of tall Korean men vacationing with their wives and kids, and they all had 2-4 kids. As for the height, I myself am a 180 cm tall Northeastern tribal male, and all the Korean men I saw were either as tall as me or taller than me. It was an eye opening experience as to how tall Korean men are, and more power to them 👍. And I have also watched plenty of K-dramas and movies, especially movies so seeing tall Korean men irl was a fun experience. It was also wholesome to see that they were married fathers, God knows Korea needs more of them lol.

How many more times does this need to happen? This doesn't just affect Okinawans or Japanese, but even diaspora communities too.

Some people here pay taxes (hopefully begrudgingly) that indirectly support these types of things.

There have been a few posts recently about non-East/South East Asia. This sub largely focuses on those of East Asian descent. It includes South East Asia because many of those people have strong Sinosphere influences and diaspora.

The label "Asian" is a poor label, as many of you know (alternatives are also not great). It has also been used to link South Asians (meaning a general label of "South Asia", itself not exact as there are ethnic groups within South Asia) with East or SE Asians. This sub does not support that. It is also being applied to mixed-race Asians as full "Asians". This sub does not support that either.

So the problem is trying to use a poor label (and admittedly one that evolved through a western lens) to create boundaries for this sub. Without boundaries, you end up with the mess of other Asian spaces where nearly anyone can join. That has been the root of many problems for ESEA people i.e. lack of gatekeeping, which is a core theme of this sub.

The term Asian is poor because it also fails to distinguish ethnic groups that are somewhat similar to Sinosphere people in countries like Nepal, Bhutan and North East India. (I also know this as someone who meets Nepalese and Bhutanese people.) However, this sub does not cater to those places or similarly Central Asia because of the widening cultural and phenotypic population groups.

That's not to say that some of these ethnic groups don't face western-style racism and brainwashing that ESEA people do, but other subs cater specifically to those groups, or other subs have an all-encompassing Asian definition.

u/Primary_Breakfast674 take note. You have posted to various Asian subs trying to promote your plight with ESEA people. We reject racism towards us (from whites, blacks, Indians, Middle Easterners... even ourselves) but your campaign against Indians falls outside the boundaries of this sub. Further posts referencing North East India will be removed.

All of this leads to the idea of pan-Asianism. This sub does not actively promote pan-Asianism but does not reject it either. This sub is about anti-western hegemony and anti-racism towards ESEA people (and sadly, sometimes, from ESEA people - a cancer). If you want to promote pan-Asianism, then fine. But the current reality is that ESEA people don't often get along, and that's outside of western influence. This is not an Asian issue - just ask the French and English how they get along, or the Canadians and the Americans right now. At EAP, if ESEA people hated each other, but hated white/western supremacy even more, that would be a step forward. The other problem with pan-Asianism is that it's a very American idea, and this sub rejects the Asian American political view of grouping everyone from continental Asia and the Pacific Islands. This is not an Asian American sub, so don't expect that form of American politics here.

In a sense this sub is pretty simple. We have no pseudo-activist grandiosity. We have no putting Asian men or Asian women first. This is a space for monoracial ESEA people to fight racism and western dominance. It encourages strong community. It is a sub for and by ESEA people and the only one of its kind on Reddit.

If the above doesn't match your views, other "Asian" subs might cater better.

i don’t know how to describe my rage but it pisses me off. in a conversation for ask japanese people, you see “not japanese… but…” in a conversation about east asian people, you see “not east asian but…”

i saw a post by an east asian person asking if other east asian people agree that non-east asians wanting to look like us was weird. east asian people spoke up and said it was weird. non-east asian people came along and said it wasn’t weird. they go “who cares?” the people who got called “ching-chong” and accused of dog-eating care! they only want to look east asian because it’s cool now but when real east asian people speak up they get downvoted and ignored while the non-east asian people get upvoted.

i say i’m japanese and cantonese, some talking poop debris says something like “cantonese is a regional dialect, buddy.” cantonese is a fucking ethnic group from china part of han chinese.

they think we’re so fucking weak that they can talk over us. fuck them all.

🤣🤣🤣

For thoughts you feel don't need a dedicated post, put them here. Renews every Monday.

Last time I went to go visit my family in NYC (I live in China and have been for about 15 years), literally within an hour of arriving there some crazy dude yelled at me and my cousin on the street, calling us the f-word.

Almost every time I go back, I get more intense random encounters with insane people in a month than I do years in China, like my wife would randomly get approached by clearly schizophrenic or weird white men, like one picked a random flower from the street and gave it to her, and it made her so uncomfortable to the point that she just doesn't want to go back. Ours lives, while simpler and humbler here, are just so much less stressful. There are problems, like in any place, but ironically the worst people in my wife's family are all trying to go abroad while the normal ones are perfectly happy here.

I asked my cousin (who is mid to late 30's and still unmarried) why he liked America compared to China, after I told him that in China I never have to worry about this. He goes, "but at least in America I can draw a picture of Trump sucking his own dick if I wanted to." And I asked him, is that worth being assaulted by schizophrenics on the street? I also wanted to add "worth not getting women at all" but I didn't want to hurt him.

Anyways a few years later his mom visited me in Shenzhen and all she did was talk shit about China, Chinese people, I even pointed out an advertisement with Liu Yifei on it (who grew up in NYC but moved back to China), and she made a snide comment about plastic surgery even though I literally went to school with her in Queens and she wasn't even the prettiest Asian girl there. Recently we bought a home in China, a really beautiful duplex, and my family kept asking for photos and trying to compare it to their wooden properties in America and it was just so obviously trying to find any excuse to call it "shoddy Chinese construction" or look for flaws in it.

I feel like these people are so obsessed with trying to prove they're better than other Chinese people that they just completely turn a blind eye to racism and terrible things just to get a leg up on other Chinese. Past a point it's just literally insane behavior and there's no reasoning with it.

Edit: I forgot to mention when we were there diaspora was mad hostile to us, some Taiwanese shopkeeper literally refused to talk to us because he assumed we were mainland. Fuck these people

I’m from Nepal, which is a South Asian country, but here’s the thing: I have an East Asian phenotype.

There are a lot of Nepalis from ethnic groups like Rai, Limbu, Sherpa, Gurung, Tamang, Dolpo, Magar, etc. who have EA/SEA phenotypes. A lot of them can look more SEA, like Vietnamese or Filipino, while others, especially those with fair or pale skin, look East Asian.

And just like East Asians, EA/SEA looking Nepalis get the same anti-east asian slurs and racism in non asian countries. The UK is a good example since there are a lot of Nepalis living there.

Nepali girls from those EA/SEA looking castes/ethnic groups very rarely, like REALLY rarely, marry white guys, even if they’re living in white majority countries. Hell, we rarely marry outside of our own ethnic group/caste. Marrying a non EA/SEA looking Nepali is seen as pathetic and disgraceful.

So I wanted to know, do you guys see us as one of you? Are we allowed in this sub and other pro asian subs?

Article in full in case of paywall

Yap Yok Foo is a retired chartered accountant living in Kuala Lumpur.

Published: 5:30am, 3 Oct 2026

Every morning, I settle into my armchair in Kuala Lumpur, pen in hand, to tackle The Times cryptic crossword, freshly downloaded from the internet. It is a ritual I have observed since my university days in the United Kingdom. I have become rather adept at it; in fact, puzzle devotees might recognise Sayang, the pseudonym under which I set crosswords for the Financial Times.

I can still recite the names of England’s 1966 World Cup squad in my sleep. My youth was scored to the sounds of Cliff Richard, The Beatles, The Hollies and The Rolling Stones.

By almost any measure, I am an unrepentant Anglophile. Yet, at 80, I find myself watching my grandchildren and being overtaken by a profound swell of emotion. Suddenly, and with startling clarity, I feel incredibly proud to be Chinese.

The road to this realisation has been long, winding and strewn with the cultural detritus of empire.

My story begins in 1946, in Kluang, a small town in Johor in what was then Malaya. My father, an orphan from a village in Nanan, Fujian, had fled economic hardship in search of a new life across the South China Sea. When I was born, Malaya was still scarred by the Japanese occupation and the British colonial administration had only recently resumed its suzerainty.

While my father dutifully sent most of my siblings to Chinese vernacular schools, fate or perhaps sheer happenstance steered me, the sixth child, to a kindergarten run by Roman Catholic nuns, where English was the sole medium of instruction.

Thirteen years in government English schools followed before I found myself in Mother England, reading economics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Along the way, I became a voracious reader, volunteering as a school librarian just to be closer to the world of Enid Blyton, P.G. Wodehouse, Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare.

I could trace the Battle of Hastings and the lineage of British monarchs with ease. Of Chinese literature, I knew almost nothing – save for Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West, and even then only in outline. Of Chinese sportsmen and women, I knew even less.

I eventually married a wonderful woman, also wholly educated in English. While our own parents had spoken to us in Chinese dialects, our three children grew up speaking only the language of Shakespeare. They became “bananas” – yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Two went to Oxford; the third to the University of Western Australia. I had succeeded in raising global citizens, but the thread connecting us to our ancestral homeland had worn perilously thin.

Then came the reckoning that only age and a changing world could bring. In recent years, the history books I once revered began to read very differently. The opium wars ceased to be mere footnotes; they became vivid, visceral acts of humiliation inflicted upon a people I realised, with a jolt, I belonged to. When I read the Western media, I began to notice a persistent, and often unfair, hostility towards China’s rise. Where I once nodded in passive agreement, I now felt a growing urge to defend China.

The true turning point, however, was physical. I made trips to China, including two emotional pilgrimages back to my father’s birthplace in Fujian. Standing on the very soil he had left as a penniless teenager and witnessing the breathtaking transformation of the country, a profound pride swelled within me – a pride of kinship.

At a beer festival in Qingdao, Shandong, where the Germans built a brewery in 1903, I learned that China had contributed to the first world war effort and requested the return of Shandong from a defeated Germany. I was stunned to discover that Western powers ignored China’s contribution and instead awarded administration of Shandong to Japan. Such a profound indignity inflicted on the ancestral homeland has never left me.

It was around this time that I began, belatedly, to acquaint myself with Chinese athletes. I now know the names Quan Hongchan and Pan Zhanle, alongside Yao Ming and Li Na. It is a small education, but telling: proof that the gap in my knowledge was never about absence of achievement, only absence of attention.

For years, I had felt a quiet inadequacy among my peers in Malaysia and Singapore. We shared the same colonial education, but many of us carried a silent grief for the rich heritage we had left behind. At my age, I assumed it was simply too late to change.

But history has a beautiful way of righting itself. My second son married a remarkable woman who had received a traditional Chinese education before studying in Australia. She understands the importance of passing on our cultural heritage. Her two children are enrolled at Kuen Cheng, a reputable Chinese school in Kuala Lumpur.

My greatest joy now is sitting with my grandchildren, trading the complex cryptic clues of a Financial Times crossword for the tonal rhythms of Mandarin. I am learning from them, just as they are learning from me.

I will still cheer for Malaysian athletes on international courts, and my Spotify library still holds 7,000 Western pop songs against a mere 10 Chinese tracks (mostly Teresa Teng and Frances Yip). But as I watch my grandchildren speak the language of my father, I know the circle is complete.

I am an Anglophile by education, a Malaysian by loyalty, but in my heart and soul, I will forever be Chinese. China is the land of my father and today, I silently and proudly cheer it on.

This Singaporean made the wrong decision. Yes, he broke a local rule, but you never not take offense at the slant-eyed gesture. The Swiss had the right to be annoyed, but he had no right to racialize it. The Singaporean apologized for his error, but the Swiss took it to the next level - and that's when you stop being apologetic.

It is a mistake that native and diasporic ESEA people do - accept offence. You are not walking the high ground. It makes you, and by association, other ESEAs look weak, which allows racism towards us. It makes ESEA women targets of non-ESEA men, because our graciousness is interpreted as an invitation for domination. This has been the history of ESEA people for a very, very long time.

Take the reverse - Singapore is a country of strict rules, but you will never see a Chinese man make racist gestures towards a white man who makes a faux pas. And if he did, you can be sure that the white man would start a fight over it.