What’s In A Name?
1. Think about your own name. Did you ever have trouble spelling it as a kid? Does your name bear any resemblance to something unfortunate that haunted you through school (and possibly beyond)? Does your name have any stereotypes associated with it?
2. Names seem so straight-forward. It was probably the first thing you leant how to say and spell, it’s possibly one of the words you will hear and say most often in your lifetime — beaten only by hello and goodbye; or in my case: fuck.
3. Consider my name. By birth in Hong Kong, my name is Kung Chun Hin:
4. When I was seven, my family moved to Australia. I remember a conversation I had with my family, talking about what English names my sister and I should take on. I first wanted “Peter”, but Mum thought that “Peter” was a name for triad punks (nevermind that my Dad’s name is the Dutch version of “Peter”). Anyway, such was my level of English (zero) and imagination (sizable, but not in English) that my next choice was “John”, and so it stuck, and I named myself “John Chun Hin Kung”.
5. Over the course of time and several run-ins with, err, less worldly Government officials, I took to hyphenate my middle names; apparently when confronted with “John Chun Hin Kung”, some people couldn’t figure out which was my middle name and which was my surname. So my name became “John Chun-Hin Kung”, which is what appears on my passport.
6. Just before I came to Japan, I stopped by Hong Kong to visit family, and to get my Hong Kong permanent ID card, which gives me the Right of Abode in Hong Kong. The officials there were very helpful; they understood that some Western officials were, err, unhelpful and easily confused. So the name on my ID card was “Kung, John Chun-hin”.
7. When I got to Japan, Japanese officals were far more strict about how names were recorded, and my name became “Kung John Chun-Hin” (note the lack of comma after my surname). This was fine, it’s close enough to my passport and how I’m known in Australia. The trouble only came to bear when I was getting married.
8. According to government officials here, “John Chun Hin Kung”, “John Chun-Hin Kung”, “Kung, John Chun-hin” and “Kung John Chun-Hin” were all different people. Order and punctuation were very important, any deviatiation could cause terrible confusion. And if you have ever dealt with Japanese beauracracy, you’d know what I mean. If not, imagine you have no legs, and you were placed at the end of a long gravel driveway and told to crawl to the house. It gets old pretty quick.
9. And it gets better — it’s generally custom for the wife to change her surname to match mine, but since Japanese uses Chinese characters, does she use my romanised surname, or the original Chinese? I would prefer Chinese, but then that doesn’t match any of our documents so far, so that would cause that “terrible confusion”. Luckily for us, the changing of her name is a custom, not a requirement.
10. Add to this a new dilemma — it has become popular for the Chinese to keep the order of their names, and add their English name to the front, so in my case that would be “John Kung Chun Hin”. I really like this, it keeps the original order while conforming to Western standards. And officials now are more aware of non-Western names, and it’s a lot easier now than it has ever been. But because of a choice made in necessity when I was a teenager, I’m stuck with the name that was shaped by others. And one’s name is, in the end, all that one has; everything else can be lost or stolen or given away, but a name stays true. I just wish I could have the name that best represents me.
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