王大中 vs. Da-zhong Wang vs. DJ Wong
May 15th, 2009 | View Comments
I wanted to respond to Peter’s post about the Texas voter ID law.
First, a bit of background on how Chinese names usually work.
Most Chinese names have three characters (though some only have two). The surname goes first, and the remaining two characters are your given name.
For example, everyone’s favorite Chinese textbook hero is named 王大中. 王 (wang2) is his surname. 大中 (da4 zhong1) is his given name.
How do you turn that into English? We here at Chipanglish use Hanyu Pinyin for transliterating Chinese words. It’s the international standard (at least as of 1982, and didn’t become the standard in Taiwan until January 1 of this year), but there are plenty of other systems out there.
In Hanyu Pinyin 王大中 becomes Dazhong Wang. Or Da-zhong Wang. Or Da Zhong Wang which becomes Da Z. Wang.
Use a different system (or make up your own) and you might wind up with Da-jong Wong instead. It’s the same name, just transliterated differently. Let’s assume for a minute that he goes with Dajong Wong for first and last names when filling out the immigration paperwork, leaving the middle name blank.
And after living in the US for a while, Dajong gets tired of people butchering his name and decides to go by DJ instead. His immigration papers, passport, and driver’s license still all say Dajong Wong, but his college transcript, his library card, his frequent flyer card, and his voter registration card (which tend to have more lenient ID requirements) all say DJ Wong.
He goes to vote, is asked to show ID, and is denied because the voter rolls say DJ Wong, but his driver’s license says Dajong Wong. He can’t prove it’s the same person.
That’s the issue in a nutshell. And it will rapidly expand beyond voting and into flying, as TSA Secure Flight now requires that the name on your ID, ticket, and frequent flyer information match exactly.
Now, I do think people have a legal responsibility to keep the usage of their legal name straight. It’s one thing to go by DJ socially, but if your legal name is Dajong, that’s what should go on official documents.
But Betty Brown’s suggestion that people could solve the problem by changing their names to something more American is completely asinine for two reasons:
- A big part of the problem comes from people trying to do exactly that, albeit not through official legal channels.
- This is not a problem limited to Asian names!
Say your name is Annemarie Smith, but you normally just go by Anne. If the voter rolls say Anne Smith and your ID says Annemarie Smith, well…that doesn’t match either.
Or now about a last name? Say your name is Ana Ramirez Delgado. In keeping with Hispanic naming customs, “Ramirez Delgado” is your full last name (no hyphen), but you just use Ramirez for most occasions. But thanks to clerical error, you show up on the voter rolls as Ana R. Delgado. Which does not match your ID.
Stuff happens with hyphenated last names too. Just ask Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.
From a policy standpoint, the obvious first step is to have a nation-wide standardized format for names that can handle hyphens and spaces in your names (and also really long names). Middle names should stop being optional—if you have no middle name you should check a box confirming thus. IDs should specify what is first, middle, and last, rather than leaving it up to clerks and bureaucrats of varying degrees of cluelessness to figure out what is what. Second step, be a bit lenient if it’s obvious a hyphen/space got screwed up in data entry, making you Sara Kelly Johnson instead of Sara Kelly-Johnson.
And now to bring it full circle back to Texas. Unlike the federal government and every other state I’ve lived in, Texas does not do hyphens on IDs. My middle name is hyphenated. I could either drop half of my middle name or mash the two parts together sans hyphen. I chose to mash.
And so now I have the absurd situation where the name on my passport (and social security card, and birth certificate) is hyphenated and the name on my driver’s license is not. My primary forms of government-issued ID do not all match exactly.
If I’m ever in a situation where that hyphen actually matters, I’m screwed.
Yvonne posted this on May 15th, 2009 @ 9:27pm in Chinese, Culture Gaps, Translations | Permalink to "王大中 vs. Da-zhong Wang vs. DJ Wong"
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