>They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention.

I find it bizarre that they felt the need to specify "Asian". What does that have to do with anything?

Latin alphabet transcription of East Asian languages tend to be incredibly lossy and there tends to be a lot of ambiguities.

That Vietnamese surname of Nguyen is formally written as Nguyễn in the current script, or as 阮 in the old adapted Hanzi script, and practically pronounced somewhere around "gwen". Most other EA countries tend to do equivalents of "阮" -> "gwen", and East Asian cultures generally prefer Last-First ordering, which tend to put more information in the first name, and so there are going to be tons of last names in Latin that end up being barely unambiguous to be a form of identification.

These can be a problem if email addresses are going to be formulated as e.g. "阮 必成" -> "Nguyễn Tất Thành" -> "Gwen Tat Than" -> "t.gwen@example.net", even if the surname is going to be that much long(although Nguyen in particular is just identical even in Vietnamese).

(Japan may be less affected thanks to having default 2+ char random surnames farmers made up in modernization efforts, but there are still the 灘(nada) highscool, the 津(tsu) city, etc etc that can be NLP problems)

They are definitely trying to get you to think that Apple (the company perhaps single-handedly responsible for developing Chinese manufacturing) is racist

Roughly one in five Koreans have surname "Kim".

Upward of 40% Vietnamese have surname "Nguyen".

"Li" is quite popular in China.

Specifying "Asian last name" in this context is quite apt.