Who is Chinese? The answer may seem simple at first: a person who looks Chinese.

But imagine a young woman born and brought up in the U.S. Her grandmother is from China, and she happens to have inherited many of her grandmother’s physical traits. She doesn’t speak Chinese or identify in any way with Chinese culture, and she thinks of herself as a proud American. When she is called Chinese, she forcefully rejects the label.

Or consider my own case. Canadian by birth, with Caucasian physical features, I have lived and worked in China for more than two decades, speak the Chinese language, identify with Chinese culture and am now a permanent resident of China. But almost no one considers me Chinese.

Both of these instances point to the difficulty with a view that is deeply ingrained in contemporary China and at least implicitly endorsed elsewhere: That to be Chinese is to belong to a race.

I feel welcomed and loved in China. My wife is Chinese, and I’ve done my best to integrate since arriving in 2004. But I can’t fully succeed. My Chinese friends sometimes call me a “Chinese son-in-law.” It’s meant as a compliment, but the implication in Chinese is that I’m not fully Chinese.