Frequently asked questions.

This directory covers businesses owned by people from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands, consistent with the United Nations geoscheme for Asia and Oceania. It also includes diaspora communities shaped by colonization, migration, and resettlement whose origins trace back to these regions. This list represents countries and major cultural communities, not an exhaustive list of every ethnic group within each country.

East Asia

(UN geoscheme: Eastern Asia)

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Taiwanese, Hongkonger, Macanese, Okinawan, Tibetan

Southeast Asia

(UN geoscheme: South-Eastern Asia)

Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Cambodian, Khmer, Laotian, Hmong, Mien, Burmese, Bruneian, Timorese

South Asia

(UN geoscheme: Southern Asia)

Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Bhutanese, Maldivian, Afghan

Central Asia

(UN geoscheme: Central Asia)

Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen

Pacific Islands

(UN Environment Programme Pacific Island Countries Network; US Census Bureau NHPI classification; US National Park Service Pacific Islander Heritage documentation)

Cook Islands Māori, Fijian, I-Kiribati, Marshallese, Chuukese, Pohnpeian, Kosraean, Yapese, Nauruan, Niuean, Palauan, Papua New Guinean, Samoan, Solomon Islander, Tongan, Tuvaluan, Ni-Vanuatu, Native Hawaiian, Chamorro, Carolinian, American Samoan, Tahitian, Tokelauan, Rapa Nui, Rotuman, Torres Strait Islander, West Papuan, Kanak

Sources: United Nations geoscheme for Asia and Oceania; UN Environment Programme Pacific Island Countries Network; US Census Bureau Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander classification; US National Park Service Pacific Islander Heritage documentation.

Write it in exactly as you identify when you submit your business. We won't change it, and communities are added over time as the directory grows.

Always. Finding businesses, submitting a business, being listed, all of it is free. No paid tiers, no featured placements, no ads. That's not changing.

Underneath the city map, you'll see that every business has a card and every card has a small flag icon in the top right corner. Click it, describe the issue, and someone on our team will review it. You don't need an account to do this.

Storefront — Has a physical location customers can visit. Will appear on the map.

Local, no storefront — Operates locally but has no physical storefront. Think mobile services, home-based businesses, or local contractors. Won't appear on the map.

Online only — Sells or operates entirely online. Won't appear on the map. Still needs to be associated with a city.

The business should be majority-owned by someone who identifies as part of one of the communities we cover. We don't ask for documentation, and we rely on community accountability. If something doesn't look right, anyone can flag it.

Hit Submit a business at the top of any page and fill out the form.

Yes. Community nominations are welcome. If you know a place that belongs here, tell us. Business owners can always reach out through the contact form if they have questions about their listing or want their listing removed.

No. Submit as many as you know.

Yes. We list storefronts, local businesses without a public address, and online-only businesses. If you don't have a physical address, we ask for the city you're based in so we can add you to the correct city directory. Storefronts get pinned on the map and all businesses show up in the directory cards underneath the map.

We organize the directory around major metro hubs rather than every suburb or surrounding city. If a storefront is located in Kawasaki or Yokohama, for example, it will appear under Tokyo while still being pinned to its actual address on the map. For businesses without a physical storefront, we'll group listings under the nearest major metro area based on where the business is located.

Our metro hub list is based on the United Nations definition of urban agglomerations above 300,000 people. Source data: UN World Urbanization Prospects 2025. We processed this into a developer-friendly dataset of 1,914 cities across 155 countries, with city name, country, ISO codes, latitude, longitude, and 2025 population estimates. Free to download and use in CSV and JSON. Download the dataset →

We review every submission. If your business is approved it'll show up in the directory.

If your business doesn't show up in the directory, it's usually because something in the submission needs clarification rather than a permanent no. Use the contact form if you want to follow up.

Yes. Reach out via the contact form and we'll take care of it.

Reach out through the contact form and we'll remove your listing. No questions asked.

Flag it. Use the flag icon on the business card and select 'This business's ownership doesn't match its listed community.' Someone on our team will look into it before any action is taken.

A person. Every single one. We built this directory because automated tools aren't good at the kind of cultural distinctions this requires. That's not going to change.

Diaspora communities exist everywhere, not just in their countries of origin. Paris has had a Cambodian community since the late 1970s, when refugees fled the Khmer Rouge and resettled across France. Today there are dozens of Cambodian-owned restaurants and businesses in the city (particularly in and around the 13th arrondissement) enough that Cambodian food has developed a small but established presence within Paris's broader Southeast Asian food culture. A Cambodian family visiting Paris might want to find businesses owned by people from their community. Someone who grew up eating Cambodian food and moved to Paris might want to find it again. A backpacker who has a specific craving for Khmer cuisine might want a suggestion on where to go.

Google is very good at organizing businesses by category, keyword, popularity, and location but community ownership isn't a primary organizing layer. You can search "Cambodian restaurant Paris" and find great places to eat, but it is much harder to discover businesses specifically owned by Cambodians in Paris, which is a different and more specific thing entirely.

Google does allow some merchants to add identity attributes like "Asian-owned" to their profiles, but participation is optional and adoption is inconsistent. The system isn't designed around the nuance of diaspora communities. Cambodian, Vietnamese, Hmong, Okinawan, and Marshallese businesses can all end up flattened into a single broad label despite having entirely different histories, languages, and cultural identities.

A directory organized by specific community, curated by people, and built to work across cities globally is a different kind of tool altogether and that's what we've aimed to build here.

Keeping a directory current is hard. Businesses close, move, and sometimes disappear from the web without warning. Here's how we stay on top of it:

Every month, we run an automatic check on storefront listings through the Google Places API and archive anything marked permanently closed. For businesses with websites, we run a monthly script that checks whether each URL is still live and flags anything that does not respond for human review. Every listing in our directory also has a small flag icon so visitors can report something that looks off, since the people who actually visit these places will know before we do.

When you spend money at a local business, more of that money stays in your community. Studies consistently show that locally-owned businesses recirculate money in their local economy at a much higher rate than businesses with no local connection. Proximity also drives repeat behavior. A business you can walk or drive to is one you come back to.

Even if a business operates entirely online, it still has a home. Associating it with a city means the people in that community can find it, talk about it, and recommend it to people they know, whether those people live nearby or across the country. For an online business, that local word of mouth is a huge advantage. Personal recommendations are the most trusted form of business discovery, and they come from people, not search results. A global alphabetical list gives you neither.

Check the homepage for the current list. We're constantly adding more cities so if your city isn't there yet, submit a business anyway and we'll build it out.

Yes. Find your good place. runs on a purpose-built infrastructure for community business directories. Search, maps, human curation workflows, automated data verification, and community-level filtering across 60+ heritage groups. License it and launch your own directory in weeks, not months. Learn more →

Yes. The Find your good place. API gives developers and organizations access to structured, verified data on East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Central Asian, and Pacific Islander-owned businesses and diaspora communities in cities around the world. Every record is human-curated, regularly verified, and updated by people who care about accuracy. Learn more →