“He has really treated his Asian identity as a point of humor or deflection, and he may think that’s necessary,” said Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novelist and professor at the University of Southern California, who has interviewed Mr. Yang onstage. “I think it’s telling that he hasn’t found an approach that takes it seriously, rather than using it as a way to be disarming for many Americans who might not know Asians.”

Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, said Mr. Yang “is not seen a typical minority candidate because he has not talked about issues in ways that appeal to a broad swath of the black, Latino and Asian-American electorates.”

To that point, several experts and activists in the Asian-American community said they hope he will use his time as the only candidate of color on the debate stage Thursday to address issues of race head-on.

“He needs to more fully spell out how his signature issue — the freedom dividend — plays out in minority communities,” Professor Ramakrishnan said.

Mr. Yang will be taking his place in the spotlight in a state that is home to one-third of all of the country’s Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. Of course, Asian-Americans are no monolith, and the term encompasses a huge range of ethnicities, nationalities, languages and political views. (One example: Thursday’s Democratic debate will be moderated by NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz, who is Pakistani-American, in what community activists say will be a first for an Asian-American.) And nowhere is that diversity more clear than in California — a state with significant Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and Japanese populations among others.