Languages of China Puns

My native language is dutch and in the sentence "hoe lang" means "how long". When pronouncing "hoe lang" in dutch it sounds like a chinese name. phonetically it would be "Hulang".

So my dad would always say out of nowhere "Hoelang is een Chinees", which translates into "How long is a chinese". Usually the people who hear the joke are clueless and look at him and weird and say "i dont know, i dont think all the chinese people have the same heigth, why do you ask me this?". Then he would say "Huh, what are you talking about? I was talking about my friend Hulang from China hahahahhahaha". He always laughs extremely loud after telling the joke, its part of the routine.