This essay proposes a framework to understand the identity of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, including the strategies available to them to negotiate various overlapping conditions of (un)belonging in ethnic, national, and global imaginaries. Our intervention emerges from a discontent with dominant ways of understanding the global movement and settlement of the ethnic Chinese that predominantly draw from models that privilege East-to-West movements and transactions. We aver that such models tend to rely almost exclusively on minoritarian frameworks, homogenizing the experience of the diasporic Chinese despite their geographical, historical, social, and even cultural diversity—that is to say, designating them as a disadvantaged minority group vis-à-vis the dominant white westerners (Ang, 2001; Ma, 1998; Khoo, 2005; Teng, 2005; Wang, 2012). However, this dichotomous framework is not universally applicable. We propose three concepts that we suggest are crucial in understanding the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia: (a) the unhomely, (b) flexible citizenship, and (c) passing. Such concepts remain neglected in current scholarship on the diasporic Chinese, and we underscore their importance in understanding the experience of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in the age of globalization.