What's in a Name?

Americans sometimes ask me what's my 'real' name when I introduce myself as Brandon. Surely my Chinese name is more authentic, the more correct way to address me, their reasoning probably goes, and I don't fault them in that because usually it's born from a desire to be friendly and accommodating by taking the trouble to learn how I presumably am accustomed to being called, even though it might be hard to pronounce. So they are sometimes surprised when I tell them that it is my legal name, it's how I've always been called and how I think of myself. And yes my English is very good because it's my first language: I read it, speak it, think in it, and dream in it.

So it was with some disappointment that I read Lee Wei-ling's column on Chinese who adopt Western names for themselves (via TOC). Her argument is that doing so, unless one is a Christian adopting a Christian name, is inauthentic and vain, trying to make oneself out to be something that one is not, and making a fool of oneself in the process. I disagree deeply with this assessment, and with her basic assumption that taking on a Western name is the same thing as blindly exalting the West over one's own cultural and ethnic heritage.

There are a few reasons why one might want to adopt a Western name if one wasn't born to one: (1) To make it easier for Westerners to address you, if your name is hard to pronounce. (2) The idea that if one uses a Chinese name when speaking Chinese, one should use an 'English' name when speaking English, as a matter of complementarity. (3) To invent a new identity for oneself, to become a self-made person of some sort. (4) Because it is fashionable and everyone else is doing it. (5) As a pen name or working name to put some distance between oneself and the people one meets in the course of one's vocation. Lee's article directly criticizes only the fourth group, and implies that the fifth are déclassé, but doesn't address the other motivations above. Group 1, for example, chooses new names for themselves out of consideration for others' convenience, and group 2 espouses a very intuitive way of looking at the issue of names and languages if one is bilingual or multilingual.

Lee, like her father, whom she cites in her essay, is quite a cultural purist; in her father's case, this purism was born as a direct response to the colonial experience. But a multiplicity of names has been the norm, rather than the exception, for most cultures, including the Chinese, until quite recently. Literary Chinese of the past, for example, would choose for themselves a nom de plume that expressed some character or made reference to some place of significance to themselves. Chinese generally would not refer to each other, especially their elders, by their names given at birth, but would use generational terms, or familiar nicknames. One's 'true' name, though, was what was inscribed on the ancestral tablet and recorded in the genealogies. This is not to say that in traditional Chinese society, adopting a new name was not a mark of vanity - calling oneself the "Old Poet of Such-and-such Grove" surely is! - but instead that the vanity 'epidemic' is nothing new. It's not a malaise of modern society, as Lee supposes, but merely a reincarnation of an age-old way to distinguish oneself from the crowd, and quite literally make a name for oneself.

The most incongruous point in her article is that she accepts, and even approves, of Malay names derived from Arabic and Sanskrit roots. These attest to two of the great cultural exchanges that swept through the Malay Archipelago in its long history; at some point someone must have made the decision to adopt a new, 'foreign' name, and that decision stuck. How is that any different from what we've been discussing before?

It's easy to laugh and point at people who try too hard to be different: the "Uneeks" and "Uniques" that she mentions in her article, for example. (Steven Levitt also brought up the example of babies named "Unique", and observes in a chapter of his book Freakonomics that your circumstances of birth might determine your name, but how well you do in life is not so much a function of the weird name you have but instead those same circumstances that predisposed you to your name.) Her fundamental thesis is that non-Westerners who choose Western names for themselves are culturally insecure, and leaves her analysis at that. On the other hand, I think that the cultural purism that she preaches, and the unwillingness to accept the cross-culturality inherent in something as deeply personal as one's own name, points to an even deeper and more insidious kind of cultural insecurity. In Singapore our cultural inheritance is a curious pastiche anyway. We speak a colonial language, we watch and listen to media from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, we eat food from basically everywhere... but our names must somehow be 'pure'? The sooner we accept the 'rojak' in us, the sooner we can get past this post-colonial hangover, and become truly comfortable in calling ourselves Singaporean.