East Asians are people who are from China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan or Mongolia, whereas South Asians are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka or Maldives., Culturally, South Asia is very different from East and South East Asia. Popular usage of the term “Asian” (in America anyway) refers to people from the East., The terms South Asian and Southeast Asian refer to broad ethnic and cultural categories, each comprised of a number of ethnic and national groups. Almost all South Asians in the United States came from or are descendants of those who came from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka., It’s clearly wrong to identify your regional origin as ‘Asian’, but everyone says it as though it’s perfectly reasonable. It’s apparently short for ‘South Asian’, but the abreviation to ‘Asian’ makes it annoyingly meaningless. Some abbreviations are meaningful in context., "Asian" has come to be used to refer to the prototypical Asian in both countries - which is a South-Asian origin in Britain and an East Asian origin in the US., For many, the term "Desi" â a name rooted in the Sanskrit word desh, meaning homeland â captures a shared bond among people from the Indian subcontinent. The label transcended national.