The United States, United Kingdom and Canada measure race and ethnicity. As global migration accelerates and people move fluidly between countries, our basic data buckets are failing to keep up. Take the Teochew people , to whom I belong, a subgroup originating from the coastal Chaoshan region of Guangdong province. On a typical census form in North America or Europe, a Teochew individual is recorded simply as “Chinese” or “Asian”. A single checkbox erases a complex identity, a deep history of migration and an economic network that spans the globe.