An English name for a Chinese person

‘Why do so many Chinese take English first names? Why don’t they stick with their Chinese ones? Some of the names they take sound so odd to me.’ A friend is always asking this question. He is referring to the fact that most of his Chinese acquaintances in Britain have an English name.

‘Well, it really depends on whom you ask,’ is an immediate answer.

In my case it was because our American professor could not handle seventy-two Chinese names in a single class, and so in his second or third session with us he asked if he could give each of us an English one. If any of the students had a view on this, I don’t remember them voicing it. This was the mid nineteen-eighties, and his idea seemed exotic to a bunch of twenty-somethings in the final year of their English degree.

The professor told us that since he was far away from home, he was going to give us the names of his extended family and friends so that he could feel more comfortable. He proceeded by reading out, in a funny way, our Chinese pinyin names, and then English ones that bore a vague resemblance to the way he thought ours sounded. And again, I don’t remember there being many objections to his choices, except from a few of us who did not want to share names with some popular fictional figure we had become acquainted with over the years.

Though never made explicit, it was understood that the names would be used predominantly for that particular module. Nor do I remember anyone who bothered to combine their Chinese surnames with the new English ones. In other words, someone was known simply as, say, John on his assignment for that particular module. Furthermore, some of us even went by two English names, one for each of the two American professors who were teaching us at the time. We had had other native English-speaking teachers and we were not sure why it was only the Americans who had a difficulty with our Chinese names.

Over the years, most of those who work in an international company in China have tended to adopt English names for the sake of easy identification by their international team, but some, especially those who have studied abroad, will soon change theirs once they become aware of other choices.

As for me, my English name became better known among my Chinese colleagues once I started to use it as a professional pseudonym. From the 1990s, the use of an English name was starting to gain popularity, but in adopting a professional pseudonym, I was also following a long tradition in China, which is to have as many names as one wants but to keep the Chinese name in one’s official papers.

Times have changed but one thing remains: as non-native English speakers, we are not sufficiently aware of the connotations of certain English names. So when a person comes to choose one either for herself or for a relative, a particular name is preferred to others for reasons that are often wholly whimsical.