(FWIW, my Social Security card has my age-10 nickname as my first name on it. And... nobody's ever had a cow about it not matching my passport! Yet.)
I grew up watching Ti-Hua Chang on News 4 New York, and you know how "I see it on TV twice a week" makes all things seem normal, predominant. (Even if he's the only Chinese-American correspondent I've ever known who uses an obviously Chinese given name.) So it was a little weird to me when I got to highschool and discovered all the Hong Kongese and Taiwanese kids used western given names and socked away their Chinese names in the middle-name slot in all their formal listings.
(The Japanese kids never changed names; and the few Korean students seemed to have Korean-euphonious soundalikes -- e.g. Eunice --; some of the Thai students had short nicknames like Nan but didn't list them formally as given names. Many are the solutions to anticipated White American Cluelessness.)
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Wed, Jun. 10th, 2009 10:35 pm (UTC)I grew up watching Ti-Hua Chang on News 4 New York, and you know how "I see it on TV twice a week" makes all things seem normal, predominant. (Even if he's the only Chinese-American correspondent I've ever known who uses an obviously Chinese given name.) So it was a little weird to me when I got to highschool and discovered all the Hong Kongese and Taiwanese kids used western given names and socked away their Chinese names in the middle-name slot in all their formal listings.
(The Japanese kids never changed names; and the few Korean students seemed to have Korean-euphonious soundalikes -- e.g. Eunice --; some of the Thai students had short nicknames like Nan but didn't list them formally as given names. Many are the solutions to anticipated White American Cluelessness.)