About Names

I was chatting with my friends in school one day and the topic wandered from what to eat for lunch to what to do after we go abroad. One thing I realized that appeared to be quite a big thing is the use of our names. 

 

Apparently, students studying in a bilingual school have two names - one in our mother language Chinese and another one in English. We are accustomed to being addressed in English from foreign teachers here in middle school, but had never really thought about what to be known as when we head to a different country.

 

I’ve wondered from a very young age why our foreign names had seemed “improper” in a way — many of us had them chosen from random naming websites or a dictionary, not at all deliberately picked from different possibilities like our name in Chinese where every word had a meaning. We also don’t have middle names, again adding to the strangeness of it being incomplete. 

 

Other students around me clearly worry about similar things as I did before — they fear that if they use an English name when they go abroad, local students will find them weird. But using their original name is also not a good choice, because some of the syllables are hard to pronounce for people using another language, and that might cause them to feel isolated.

 

In my point of view, this whole worrying can attribute to a way of thinking called the in-group and out-group bias. We assume that back home, people are accustomed to having two names and it doesn’t at all matter (the in-group); while abroad, people are not like us, and we portray them as mean people (the out-group). After the worrying is now known as a certain type of thinking, however, it doesn’t feel that bad. We can change our minds and use whichever name we want to — no matter using a combined name with a English first name with a Chinese last name, or using names separately — because it is our choice, and regardless of where you are, people will always respect that.