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Friday, April 24, 2009 Those Difficult Chinese Names By Paul Hsieh @ 2:24 PM Texas State Representative Betty Brown created a furor when she made the following remarks about Chinese last names during testimony on proposed voter ID legislation: Lawmaker defends comment on Asians ...Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible. "Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese -- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?" Brown said. She made her remarks to Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans. I'm sorry to hear that Ms. Brown has troubles with difficult Chinese last names like "Ko"... (Via Cynical-C.) Labels: Funny, WTF Share |    E-mail Paul Hsieh     PermaLink ()    Comments (New Page)   Subscribe to NoodleFood Blog Posts via Feed Reader   via E-mail Subscribe to NoodleCast Podcasts M4A via iTunes (MP3)   via Feed Reader   via E-mail

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	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 16:42:37 mst Comment ID: #1 Name: Keath Cole E-mail: keathcole(at)gmail.com Btw, how do you pronounce your last name? I have wondered that forever.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 16:49:24 mst Comment ID: #2 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net "Ramey Ko" is much more difficult to pronounce than a simple, straightforward Irish name like Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh :-) On a side note, I do notice that a lot of Chinese immigrants I meet have adopted Anglicized nicknames. Often the names don't necessarily have similar sounds. E.g. "Donna" instead of Xhumei or Jing. Do you have any insight into how the practice emerged?
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 16:50:17 mst Comment ID: #3 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net Keath, the interesting thing is that Diana got that question even before she changed her last name.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 19:19:31 mst Comment ID: #4 Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog Hsieh is pronounced like "she" and "eh" mushed into a single syllable. That's the pronunciation of my Taiwanese parents-in-law. I've heard different pronunciations from mainland Chinese. The current communist spelling is "Xie." That would be so much cooler, if it weren't associated with murderous evil. In any case, "Shay" is pretty close. Also, "Hsieh" is very close to the French "chez" (i.e. "the house of") which is why we refer to our home as "chez Hsieh." (That means "thank you." Perhaps that means that Paul and I are half-polite.)
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 19:34:06 mst Comment ID: #5 Name: Ryan C Speak the language, change your name, paint yourself white or GET OUTA MUH COUNTRY! /Redneck accent.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 19:49:08 mst Comment ID: #6 Name: Emma B E-mail: fertilityproject(at)gmail.com URL: http://twinproject.blogspot.com It's not just Chinese immigrants who take Anglicized names, KPO'M. I have a client whose factory is in China, and I correspond back and forth with "Helen", "Judy", and "Richard" at the factory. I vaguely assumed it's something they're taught to do, probably in English classes in school, but I don't know for sure.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 19:59:03 mst Comment ID: #7 Name: SurahAhriman E-mail: SurahAhriman(at)gmail.com KPO'M, an amusing anecdote about how the practice might have emerged: My fiance's mother is a teacher in New York, and once had a student named "Fuk Yue". After a first day of being yelled at and getting into trouble, he came into school the next day and informed her that his name was now "Tommy". I would suspect in general it's just a compromise to make life in the west less annoying.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 20:37:36 mst Comment ID: #8 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net Interesting, Emma. I wonder what the Chinese think about having to "Anglicize" their names even if they remain in China. Do you think we'll need to start adopting nicknames like Hongjie and Jiong once China's economy surpasses ours? Or do you think that English has become so entrenched after 2 centuries of first British, then American cultural domination that it will have staying power as a lingua franca even as the number of native speakers stablizes? OTOH, India may yet be the next large economy to carry the Anglophone torch. Although I joke about it a lot, the evolution of Irish names is interesting. Clearly it was a case of domination by the English, but over the years, most Irish names became Anglicized both in spelling and pronunciation to the point where hearing Caitlin pronounced in the "proper" way sounded strange. That said, traditional spellings and pronunciations have made a strong comeback in the Republic ever since it gained independence, and particularly over the past 30 years or so. China is re-emerging as a dominant power after a few centuries of being dominated by outside powers. I wonder the extent to which they might achieve or even aspire to achieve the degree of cultural hegemony that the British and Americans did. Diana, is Xie a "communist" spelling or just a mainland spelling? Since either spelling is just an approximation (since Chinese doesn't use the latin alphabet), what's wrong with choosing Xie?
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 20:54:23 mst Comment ID: #9 Name: PMB When I first met Diana, that was one of the first questions I asked her. I then admitted, that prior to our conversation, I had pronounced her last name something along the lines of "Hssssiiiiaaayyyy." I'm still not convinced I was wrong.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 21:12:58 mst Comment ID: #10 Name: Anonymity I have had to deal with call center personnel who had anglicized names like "Fred" and "Mary," when their accents (to me) clearly sounded like they were Indians. One of the doctors whose work I have transcribed has a last name of "Xie," and she seems (to me) to pronounce it as "Zee." The non-Chinese doctors who refer to her in reports also pronounce it that way.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 21:14:51 mst Comment ID: #11 Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog Xie is indeed the "communist" spelling of Hsieh. According to Wikipedia, the change in the method of romanization -- from Wade-Giles to Hanyu-Pinyin -- was instituted in 1958. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade-Giles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_Pinyin At one point, I was thinking of using "Xie" as a kind of pen name. My father-in-law -- a very low-key, friendly man -- became very nearly incensed at the prospect, precisely because of its associations with communist China. I gave up the notion immediately, of course. As he told me, it has been an election-level issue in Taiwan. (Wikipedia says that they switched to Pinyin just this year, unfortunately.)
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 22:28:33 mst Comment ID: #12 Name: William H Stoddard E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile Years ago, when I was copy editing for Academic Press, we got papers from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (the mainland). And once I heard about a very plaintive letter that had arrived from a Taiwanese author: the copy editor his paper was assigned to (NOT ME!) had changed "Republic of China" to "People's Republic of China," because they had seen it more often and didn't understand that there was a difference. The author was terrified that his career would be destroyed if it came out with "Taiwan, People's Republic of China" on it. That was when I realized that what to me was an academic issue of accurate terminology was terribly serious to the Taiwanese.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 22:32:54 mst Comment ID: #13 Name: John Harris E-mail: John.harris00(at)gmail.com when I worked at a call center one of my best friends worked there; her name is Xiong. She called herself Anne, mostly so that other Americans would not hang up on her believing she was in the south seas. Then again I was either called Sean, John, Xiong (oddly enough, I picked up a call she had, had, calling herself Xiong at the time, guy wondered why my voice had changed.) John.
	Friday, April 24, 2009 at 23:45:03 mst Comment ID: #14 Name: Michael Labeit E-mail: logician169(at)yahoo.com URL: http://unit-perspective.blogspot.com I remember being informed of the existence of a woman from Vietnam named "Phat Ho."
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 6:10:50 mst Comment ID: #15 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net To William H Stoddard, I would think that a Taiwanese academic calling for the "return" of Taiwan to Beijing would indeed be ostracized, and I can completely understand his reaction. It's a little bit like addressing mail to Anchorage, Russia.
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 6:45:37 mst Comment ID: #16 Name: Daniel URL: http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com Michael: I live in Hanoi and "Ho" is indeed a very common family name. (In Vietnamese, it's stated first of course--for example, Ho Chi Minh.) What's weird about the whole name change thing is that Chinese last names aren't really that hard to say--and if you know 20 of them you pretty much know them all. It's not like learning a new language at all--though there's nothing wrong with that!--and once you know the Chinese names, you've pretty much learned all the others. Hsieh is now Xie in China for instance. In Taiwan it is Shea; in Hong Kong, Tse; in Japanese, Sha; in Philipino, Saa.
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 6:50:56 mst Comment ID: #17 Name: Daniel URL: http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com By the way, here's a fun fact: I just did a Wiki search for Vietnamese surnames and discovered that almost 50% of the population uses the last name Nguyen and Tran (the family names of two long-running dynasties). As far as that goes it's easier than I thought--though of course the tones for Vietnamese makes it much harder...
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 7:06:40 mst Comment ID: #18 Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog Daniel : My family-in-law is from Taiwan, not China. And we're definitely Hsieh, not Shea. Notably, the family isn't recently transplanted from China (e.g. due to flight from the communist revolution). They've long been in Taiwan. Hsieh is pretty standard in Taiwan, from what I've heard, e.g. politician Frank Hsieh. I've not heard of Shea being used, but that might just be my own ignorance. The Taiwanese pronunciation was something different -- it sounded like "Chia" of "Chia pet," if I recall correctly. Here's what Wikipedia says on the variations -- which matches my limited recollections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsieh
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 7:33:16 mst Comment ID: #19 Name: William H Stoddard E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile Daniel, There are actually rather more than that. There's a traditional Chinese poem based on the 100 commonly recognized surnames. But there are others as well, hundreds or thousands apparently. It's just that there's a lot of concentration: 85% of the population of China have one of the top 100, and 95% have one of the top 200. That's on the order of 10 million people with each of the top 100!
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 9:48:59 mst Comment ID: #20 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net Apparently China has an "approved" list of names and characters that is causing problems for people whose names aren't on the list. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/world/asia/21china.html?_r=1&hp I think a number of European countries (Germany, France, and Switzerland come to mind) also regulate first names through "approved lists" or similar mechanisms. This seems odd, given Europe's image as an "open" continent, but perhaps it makes sense given their paternalistic view of government. Our president's paternalistic government tendencies notwithstanding, his own, fairly unusual name, combined with our system of federalism probably would render any such attempt impossible here. Any thoughts?
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 9:56:28 mst Comment ID: #21 Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net "Sean" (aka John), how was Xiong pronounced? Did it sound like Sean? I knew someone with a first name "Jiong" that was pronounced "Jang" (though he went by an anglicized "James"). Anyway, I wonder if Betty Brown would advocate eliminating names for hurricanes. I always thought the practice was a little strange. How awkward must it still be sometimes to have the name "Katrina"?
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 17:22:16 mst Comment ID: #22 Name: Zip E-mail: martinandreasgasser(at)hotmail.com URL: http://uncommonsensecanada.blogspot.com/ And then there were the young Korean girls a friend at work told me of who had a really hard time registering at university because none of their emails were getting through the schools spam filter... One of the girls first name was Yung, not too hard to pronounce... her sister had already adopted an Anglicized first name, Kitty. Sounds just fine so far... but their Korean surname was Porn
	Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 19:26:30 mst Comment ID: #23 Name: Daniel URL: http://thenearbypen.blogspot.com Diana: Thanks for the wiki article. I stand happily corrected as I learned a little something. :-) Wiliam: I did a search to see how many Chinese surnames there are and according to a Squidoo page there are at least 4100! Amazing. Anyway, what I was trying to get at was that the percentage of people using the same surname is very high. Apparently four surnames--Li, Wang, Zhang, and Liu--are shared between 300 million Chinese!
	Friday, May 1, 2009 at 13:27:42 mst Comment ID: #24 Name: Volga Redphone E-mail: Valda.redfern(at)gmail.com URL: http://valzhalla.blogspot.com "I have had to deal with call center personnel who had anglicized names like "Fred" and "Mary," when their accents (to me) clearly sounded like they were Indians." Actually, many Indians do have these English-sounding names - they aren't nicknames, they are literally Christian names, inherited from converts who changed their surnames to things like "Jacobs" and gave their children forenames like "Mary" and "John". The Brick Testament doesn't list any Fredericks, though. To those who have mangled my own perfectly phonetic name in the past: Yip! Yap! Nip! (Sadly, the last of these is English, not Chinese.)
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