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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.
- Justified: Bob came from an isolated community with little Asian contact.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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