You clearly don't live in the US if there is only 1 fat person in the workplace.

You're making a good point, but I think it's also equally pretty weird to just dismiss a facet of someone's humanity. It feels a little bit to me like the whole "I just pretend everyone is white"-approach.

I think there's too much nuance to make a hard rule on it. I've worked with someone who's go-to way to describe people was always ethnicity/perceived nationality-based to a weird extent, never with anything negative, but it was still jarring. Like he would say "the Bosnian guy who works with Steve" instead of "the guy who works with Steve ".

I would also find it strange if someone treated someone's race like it was a bad word. Like, I think it would be fairly natural to say "what's the name of the black guy who works in the shop?", and much less natural to say "whats the name of the person in the shop who often wears black pants, and said they were a fan of that new TV show, and they said they were from Oklahoma, and ..."

The way you described the lady. No nothing wrong with it.

If that's the actual phrasing he used, I think it was pretty weird. Not necessarily offensive, just weirdly specific in a strangely technical way. Something like "the small Asian lady" would get the point across while sounding less like you're some kind of robot or alien trying to classify her as a research specimen.

And the bit about either being from an Asian country or having Asian parents is kind of weird, for all OP knows her family might have been in the country for generations. People have a tendency to view people of Asian descent as a sort of perpetual foreigner, and that phrasing kind of feels like it's playing into that.

"East Asian" also feels needlessly specific. How likely is it that there's other women who otherwise fit the exact same description but are of, say, southeast Asian descent that OP needs to differentiate her from? I also think it's probably the kind of distinction a lot of people just won't understand. At least in the US I know I've had to explain what I'm talking about when I've talked about southeast Asia for example, a lot of people just don't think that much about geography, let alone know about the cultures and physical characteristics of people from different regions.

It just all feels like a weird way to describe someone. Personally, I wouldn't take it as rude, but it would definitely make me think that the person saying it is pretty odd and socially awkward.

It’s disrespectful to refer to someone as “the fat guy” too, perhaps moreso.

As a fat dude, I think it's a perfectly valid way to describe me. It's not insulting nor in this case used to be derogatory, it's just a fact.

It's simple: You describe the clothes they wear on that day

And yet its how I see it used in Vancouver area by people of different ethnic backgrounds. Walk into Best Buy and ask for something specific, Sikh greeter says look for the brown guy near the iPads.