Posted by Jay Livingston
There’s been a big flap, especially on the left side of the blogosphere, about Betty Brown, the Texas legislator who suggested that Asians adopt Anglo names for purposes of registering to vote. Those Chinese names are just too hard for Texans to deal with.
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?So said Ms. Brown to Ramey Ko of the Organization of Chinese Americans.
Sure, we could get all cultural relativist on this one and say that if Chinese is so difficult, how is it that over a billion people manage to speak it every day. We could also accuse her of racism, but nothing in the news reports suggests that she’s mean-spirited or even that she wants to keep Chinese people off the voting rolls. In fact, in the excerpt from the hearing that appears on YouTube, she asks Ko to come up with a proposal for solving the problem.
But she is behind the times when it comes to name changing. (Ms. Brown is not even really saying that Asians should change their names. She just suggested that they adopt a nom-de-ballot so that the poll supervisors don't make mistakes.) I’m not sure whether it’s because of PC-mandated tolerance for ethnic differences or just fashion, but we just don’t do the name-change thing so much any more. Even among media stars, names no longer have to sound American; they don’t have to sound “good.”
Annie Mae Bullock (born in 1939) performed under her married name, Tina Turner (she later dropped the husband but not the name.) Turner good, Bullock not so much. But for Sandra, born a quarter-century later, Bullock was a keeper.
Actors now keep names that they (or the studios) in earlier times would have changed as too ethnic or just ungraceful. When the studios ran things, names like Dunst or Hudgens would never gotten cast. But now we have, to name but a few
- Renee Zellweger
- Calista Flockhart
- Seth Rogen
- Jeff Goldblum
- Ben Affleck
- Amanda Righetti
- Antonio Banderas
- Liev Schreiber
- Leonardo DiCaprio
- Shia LeBeouf
- Gwyneth Paltrow
- Kate Beckinsale
- Milla Jovovich
- Charlize Theron
- Jake Gyllenhaal
- Zac Efron
- Betty Joan Perske
- Frances Gumm
- Bernard Schwartz
- Edythe Marrenner
- Constance Ockleman
- Laszlo Lowenstein
- Natalia Zakharenko
- Issur Demsky
- Margarita Cansino
- Marion Morrison
- Lucille LeSueur
- Fred Austerlitz
- Archie Leach
- Julius Garfinkle
Yes, some young hopefuls do change their names – Winona Horowitz, Jennifer Anastassakis, and others. But my impression is that it happens far less nowadays. Michael Shalhoub (b. 1932) became Omar Sharif. Tony Shalhoub (b. 1953) became Monk.
(Personal note. I saw Betty Joan Perske in the street the other day – old, bent over, walking slowly with her dog – so much different from the person in the movies that although she looked vaguely familiar, I couldn’t place her. I waited till she went inside, then asked the doorman of her building. He paused for a minute as if trying to decide whether this was a violation of a tenant’s privacy. “That,” he said, “was Miss Lauren Bacall.”)
1 comment:
Look, call it racism or call it ethno-centrism -- or whatever. But here's the problem for English-speakers: Some Asian cultures do feature fewer, single-syllable names, which can cause confusion. For example, the 2008 Ladies Pro Golf top 50 winners includes four or five Lees, five or six Kims, two Parks and a Pak. To say nothing of Ji, Jang and Choi. C'mon, man, that's corn-fusin!
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