The "country of origin" is very debatable. I consider myself Uruguayan because I was born here, but my great-grandparents were German. However, someone in Tuscany was asked, and he said "my family has only been here for four centuries". Should someone like Zidane be considered French, or "French of Algerian extraction"?

By the tuscanian's perspective, there are no Americans, only "American of Irish extraction" and so on, while over here we all consider ourselves Uruguayans.

Something you don't understand is that those terms ("Chinese-American") are an US cultural thing.

Many of my fellow countrymen (I'm from Uruguay) are extremely shocked when they go to the U.S. ... we've learned about at most 3 races, and you people have 16 !!! One of my teachers likes an anecdote where, when filling a form at San Diego University, he had to ask the clerk what "race" he was - the clerk decided he was "Hispanic", and then there was a sub-category "White Hispanic" or "Black Hispanic". However, he's descendant from Spaniards and probably the exact same racial composition as racists from California that despise "hispanics" (there was a genocide here in Uruguay and we don't have native blood, we're all descendants of spaniards, italians and other european countries, plus some descendants of slaves).