International Law

Texas to Chinese Residents: Use an English Name

By Stan

This story popped out of my usual US politics reading, but as it has a China connection and is fun, what the hell, let’s talk about it.

The context: a Texas state committee hearing on election fraud issues. The people were debating voter ID systems, one topic being how to appropriately handle foreign names.

Here’s the part that has gotten some attention, a comment by Texas Republican Betty Brown:

On Tuesday, Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans, found himself testifying against the legislation in front of the House Elections Committee. That’s when Brown felt compelled to state that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names, well, more like Republicans’ names.

“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.

The editorial/snarky stuff in there was put in by the liberal blogger I was reading.

I think we can agree that this does not look that good for Brown. At the very least, she comes across as insensitive. In my opinion, however, there’s a much better argument against her than calling her a bigot.

I personally think that a diverse society like the US should have an administrative infrastructure that can deal with any sort of name. That being said, in all fairness, the one thing that the US can limit folks to is the use of Romanized script. And since any Chinese resident can readily use pinyin, I don’t see what the problem is.

As all tourists and expats in China know, we foreigners have to change our names for a variety of administrative functions. We all either choose Chinese names or have them chosen for us (the latter guaranteeing a stupid transliteration). Never really bothered me all that much, particularly since I knew it was really necessary, given that most government officials don’t speak English and many IT systems work off of Chinese character input platforms. Putting English into the mix is difficult. I’m sure they could change their systems to allow for Romanized script input, but they don’t, and I’m OK with that.

I do think it is a bad policy, though. The big problem with having two different names occurs when you move between systems. Many folks reside in several different countries during their lives, change their names to reflect marriages, etc. You can end up with different documents with different names, which makes it difficult to use those docs for ID purposes, applying for visas, etc. One of my supporting visa docs was rejected several years ago, in fact, because it had my Chinese name listed only, not my English name.

Name changes can get complicated, and in my opinion it would make much more sense for folks to keep their original names no matter where they live (and even regardless of their marital status). We can now have one phone number for life, why not a name? (This is probably very unappealing to Chinese folks, I would guess, who seem to have no great attachment to names and have no problem changing them.)

As to Brown’s comment that not everyone should have to learn Chinese, I don’t think it would kill people to learn how to pronounce names from China, Russia, Germany, etc. You don’t have to learn the entire language, and you might learn something useful — God forbid that should happen!

One final comment. I do think that Brown is getting somewhat of a bad rap, even if I disagree with her on policy grounds. This is being discussed in terms of racism, and although she might very well be a bigot, I would give her the benefit of the doubt without further evidence that she was looking for ways to make election management more efficient. Certainly there are substantive issues to discuss here.

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Full post as published by China Hearsay on April 10, 2009 (boomark / email).