A Chang, By Any Other Name

As Betsy Brown so respectfully observed last year , memorizing and differentiating between Chinese names is, for the average foreigner, slightly more difficult than growing an extra toe. Many Chinese people therefore choose to adopt Western-friendly names when dealing with expatriates. This is sort of like when my preschool teacher would let us call him ‘Mr.Y’ because ‘Yasselski’ was too much for our little minds to handle.

Many Chinese people exasperatedly choose the simplest name they can come up with—“Just call me Bill.” Combined with the relative uniformity of Chinese surnames, this only serves to perpetuate the confusion; for instance, my office has four Bill Chens, three Wendy Wangs, and no way to distinguish between them on paper.

Others seem to put more thought, creativity, and enthusiasm into picking their English names. I can go to lunch with Apple and Teacup, the receptionists, before heading to a meeting with Handsome, Sky, and Twinkle. Sawyer, my cubicle-buddy, named himself after a character on ‘Lost.’

I met a girl at a party who introduced herself as “Foot” because her Chinese name is “Fu Te.”

And a guy named Lebron at a cafe.

In a way, I’m jealous of my coworkers’ opportunity to name themselves. Choosing a name, to me, seems a powerful statement and a serious business. It took me over a month of agonizing before I created my UM uniqname.

I’d like to think that if I had a chance to name myself, I would choose something delightfully ridiculous—Question Chang, Leipzig Chang (People do cities, right?), Rainbow City Sparkle Chang. ‘Connie’ makes me think of an awkwardly overweight housewife in the 1920s. My parents don’t even really like it; they only thought it was a perfect fit because my Grandfather named me ‘Kang-yi' in Chinese--I suppose I should really just consider myself lucky that he didn't choose ‘Fu Te.’