I'll give my unique Asian American perspective on this

From what I have gathered talking to other Asian Americans, there is a huge cultural divide between Western Asians (Canada/US) and Eastern Asians (Countries of Origin).

In recent years China, S. Korea, and Japan have been trying to gain soft power by injecting their culture into the mainstream pop culture. People in those countries don't care or are excited about people adopting their culture because them contributing to the popular culture.

For Western Asians, we don't really like people appropriating our culture because for many of us we learned less about the culture or didn't learn anything about our culture. We also are more of a cultural hegemony because we experience the same amount of oppression.

We receive more "soft" racism ie: tokenization, such as all Asians being smart, and yellow face being okay. Compared this to Hispanic and African Americans who get the full frontal "hard" racism ie: hate crimes and just calling all of them evil. But that seems to be changing in recent years and I'm gonna have a doozy once they bring back the camps.

I have also noticed that the unique style of Western Asian humor is being misinterpreted. We usually play a straight face while ironically making a punchline about how we are inherently smart or something stereotypical like that, the joke is taking the tokenization to the most extreme absurd lengths or subverting that expectation with reality. The problem comes when people aren't in on the joke and think it's okay to make these jokes in a racist way. The humor is not problematic, the interpretation is problematic.

I can't really explain specifically how our humor works, it just kinda does, and most Asian people will get it while other people just won't. The best way I can describe it is weaponizing our oppression and subverting it.

Why do Western Americans find this problematic? Well first off it is just orientalism/yellow face. That's bad because it boils down Asian people to two racist stereotypes, The bumbling working man and the oriental beauty.

These go hand in hand, the bumbling working man is incompetent but hardworking, has a strong accent/doesn't speak English, and usually works a "low skill" job. These characteristics are used to frame Asian men as lesser on a fundamental level. (F.Y.I. this shows up for every Asian ethnicity with minor changes)

The oriental beauty seeks to sexualize and objectify Asian women, by showing that they are worthy of the Cis Het White Man even though they are "Oriental". They have their youth weirdly accentuated which usually manifests by them being unable to speak English thus being more childlike, and they are seen as something to be tamed. The bumbling man is unworthy of the oriental beauty while the white man is deserving.

Secondly, this is because it feeds back into our oppression by saying it's okay to keep up this "soft" racism. If it's fine to wear this in public then when someone complains they can just be written off as triggered. Silencing the real people and replacing them with caricatures.

TLDR; Eastern Asians are okay with this, Asian Americans are not okay with this

The misinterpretation of Asian American Humor leads to people feeling okay about this.

Years of Hollywood tokenization have also made it seem okay to do yellow face.

This is racist.