What is "Asian"? Growing up as a Pakistani kid in the US, people would always say how I'm not really Asian. To them, only people from east or south-east Asia co

What is "Asian"? Growing up as a Pakistani kid in the US, people would always say how I'm not really Asian. To them, only people from east or south-east Asia counted under that label. Any census-style questions still had me marking as Asian, but there was always a bit of dissonance there. I can maybe see the desire/appeal for a label that means "all Asians except those from the Indian subcontinent, middle-east, or central Asia", but it's always been curious to me that society in America just adopted the word "Asian" for that purpose while excluding so much of "Asia" from falling under that label.