Polyphia's Tim Henson is half Chinese... or half Taiwanese?

Thee guy looks peculiar so to say, but not only because of all the tattoos and emmo gay hair and clothing but also his face. I googled his ethnicity (yes, sometimes I do these weird things) and he’s ethnically half Chinese:

I think I read in this forum the term appi before, still not sure what it means.

He also mentions that when he’s in Taiwan his whole family attends the concert. I guess that means his mom’s family is Taiwanese?

I’m curious about this guy and his music, not exactly my type of music but still guitar and still interesting, so I listen to some songs occasionally. Maybe he’s a forumosan or some of his relatives are xD

In my eyes, Taiwanese is a national identity, not an ethnicity (unless maybe you are talking about aboriginals) so you can’t really be “half Taiwanese”. If they have half Chinese ancestry but have no cultural link to Taiwan they are just half Chinese. For my daughter I’d say she is fully Taiwanese (because growing up here) with mixed European and Han Chinese ethnicity. In the same way, I also think it’s weird to say someone is half American or half British because these are not ethnicities, they are cultural identities.

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Can you be half American? or half Italian?

OK xD

It depends if you think they are ethnicities or nationalities. I’d say American is not an ethnicity. Italian I’d say perhaps falls under European ethnicity, but I’m not the judge.

Personally I don’t find it weird. Words have different meanings depending on the context.

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Fair enough

It gets quite complicated really. Culturally she is Taiwanese. Legally she is ROC Taiwanese and British. Ethnically she is half Han Chinese and European.

Cultural identity, nationality and ethnicity are three different was to categorize “where someone is from”.

Maybe I’m wrong for British:

White British is an ethnicity classification used for the native white population identifying as English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Northern Irish, or British in the United Kingdom Census.

You might also be able to say that Han Taiwanese is an ethnicity. Wikipedia says it is an ethnic group of people with full or partial ethnic Han descent, and for me it just means Han Chinese with Taiwanese culture.

Half American, no.

Half Italian, yes.

“American” is not an ethnicity, and neither is “Taiwanese”.

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Mentions a few times that people just assume he is white. I don’t think so.

To me, he looks Asian. Doesn’t even look mixed to me.

And the verb to be doesn’t apply to nationalities and other social dimensions, only to ethnicity?

Also, JFYI, there are several ethnicities in both China and Taiwan. I’m sure that in Italy you can find several different groups of people with homogeneous phenotypes.

He looks weird, I suspected he would have Asian or American blood. American as in the indigenous people who populated The Americas before the coming of the Europeans, and whose blood is very related to contemporary Asians’.

EDIT: I don’t want to sound this mean. And I mostly meant his outfit and tattoos. As for the race, now I come to think I probably unconsciously categorised him Thai?

If you’re talking about nationality, being “half-American” still doesn’t work. They only have half a US passport?

If one parent is American and the other Taiwanese, then the child is both fully American and fully Taiwanese. So if someone says they’re “half-“ something, they can only be talking about their ethnicity.

Apparently that’s not the way many people understand it.

I think everyone in this thread knew Henson meant ethnicity when he said he was half-Chinese. You were the one who brought up nationality.

That’s beyond my point, you are mixing things. One conversation is where her mother is from, and another one is the correctness of using the term “half -” referring to where one or your parents comes from.

There hundreds of ethnicities in China and thirty in Taiwan.

Hence my criticism to take these things too strictly.