“Don’t Call Me Chinese, Call Me Indian”

The camera was rolling before she decided to become famous. She was four years old, barely tall enough to reach the lens she was scolding. Someone off-screen had just called her Chinese. She did not blink. She did not reach for a lecture on ethnicity or citizenship or the tangled politics of a disputed border. She simply said it plainly, the way only a child can: “We are Indians. Call us that.”

Within days, the clip from Itanagar had traveled further than most policy speeches ever do. The girl, Karga Tinkle Gongo, had been mocked for speaking Hindi, then branded foreign for her face. A grown nation watched a preschooler correct it. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju phoned her himself and told her “The whole of India loves her.”

THE FACE IS NOT THE PASSPORT

Science offers no rescue for the stereotype. Nationality is a legal fact, not a biological one. Borders shift while faces do not. A child born in Tawang and a child born across the frontier may share ancestry and bone structure and still hold different passports.

Travel the country and the point proves itself. Ladakh carries Tibetan light in its cheekbones. Nagaland and Mizoram write their own chapter. Kashmir folds in Persian and Central Asian strands. Kerala answers to tropical centuries. Rajasthan is only one face among thousands. There is no Indian face. There are 1.4 billion Indian faces.

WHO LOOKS INDIAN?

But a phone call cannot undo a habit of seeing. Across the Northeast, people are routinely called Chinki, Momo, Nepali, Bahadur, Chowmein. Women carry an extra burden, reduced to crude questions about their ‘rate’ simply for their face. One look became ‘default Indian.’ Every other look was left to explain itself.

Here is the twist that makes Arunachal Pradesh so revealing. China claims the state. India rejects that claim. Yet Indians themselves, calling an Arunachali child Chinese, echo the very geography Delhi spends its diplomacy denying.

WHEN A WAR CHANGED THE WAY INDIA SAW A FACE

The 1962 war with China did more than redraw India’s sense of its borders. It deepened suspicion of people with East Asian features. Thousands of Chinese Indians were interned at Deoli in Rajasthan, while Northeast Indians increasingly encountered racial labels that confused appearance with nationality. The prejudice never entirely faded. During the Covid pandemic and periods of tension with China, the old insults resurfaced. Six decades later, the legacy survives in a troubling assumption: that an Indian can somehow look foreign.

Born Here, Mistaken for Somewhere Else

Take a look at people around the world who are born and raised in their own countries, yet are still mistaken for foreigners or assumed to belong somewhere else simply because of how they look.

1. Japanese Brazilians: “You look Japanese, so how are you Brazilian?”

Japanese migration to Brazil began in 1908, when the first large group arrived aboard the Kasato Maru. Over generations, the community grew, and Brazil became home to one of the world’s largest populations of Japanese descent outside Japan. Their story produced a fascinating cultural blend. Japanese traditions met Portuguese language, Brazilian food, music and football. Today, a Japanese-Brazilian may have Japanese features and a Japanese surname, yet speak Portuguese as a first language.

2. Buryats: Russians who may be mistaken for Mongolians

Around Russia’s Lake Baikal live the Buryats, an Indigenous Mongolic people whose homeland stretches close to Mongolia. Buryat communities are found not only in Russia, but also across the border in Mongolia and China. They share linguistic and cultural roots with other Mongolic peoples, yet most Buryats are Russian citizens. Their story is a reminder that ethnicity rarely follows the neat lines of a political map. Borders can divide peoples and homelands. Faces, languages and ancestry do not stop at checkpoints.

3. Fascinating “Perpetual Foreigner” concept

America has a name for a familiar prejudice: the “Perpetual Foreigner” stereotype. Asian Americans, even those born in the United States or from families settled there for generations, may still be treated as outsiders. A Pew survey found that 32% of Asian adults had been told to “go back” to their home country. It is captured in one awkward exchange: “Where are you from?” “California.” “No, where are you really from?”

4. The Afrodeutsche: Afro-Germans

For many Afro-Germans, being born and raised in Germany does not always end questions about belonging. Black Germans describe being asked, “Where are you really from?” or being praised for speaking German well, as though it were a foreign language to them. The question reveals a deeper stereotype: that being German must somehow have a particular appearance. Their experience shows how easily a face can collide with society’s imagined picture of nationality.

5. The Sámi: Scandinavia’s people who challenge the “Nordic look”

The Sámi are Indigenous people of Sápmi, a traditional homeland stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Their presence long predates the borders that now divide the region. In Norway, generations of Sámi endured a state policy of assimilation known as Norwegianisation, which sought to suppress Sámi language and culture. Discrimination has not entirely disappeared. Recent Norwegian research reports continuing ethnic harassment, with some Sámi even concealing their identity to avoid prejudice.

6. The usual ‘Chino’ Label

‘In Spanish, chino literally means “Chinese,” but across parts of Latin America the word has also been loosely applied to people who simply look East Asian. A Japanese-Peruvian or Korean-Mexican, for instance, may be called chino despite having no Chinese ancestry. The usage has deep roots. In colonial Spanish America, chino was sometimes applied broadly to people arriving from different parts of Asia, showing how diverse identities could be compressed into a single racial label.

Different Faces. Same Country. One India