What’s in a name? — How rigid forms and systems can have a negative impact on diversity and multiculturalism
I have lived in Australia for seventeen years. For at least fifteen of those seventeen years, the name that was printed on my driver’s license was a stark reminder that I am different and that I don’t fit in.
I am Singaporean Chinese, and I have two names that were given to me at birth in addition to my family name.
One of them is an English name — Deborah. I love this name. It was given to me by my parents.
It is a name that I have used all my life. Family and friends call me Deb/Debbie for short. I was named after the biblical high priestess from the book of Judges. She was the only female prophet in the Old Testament who was also a military leader and a judge. While I have since left the church, I still relate very much to the story of an intelligent, courageous (and controversial) female figure, and it fills me with joy that this is the vision that my parents had for my life.
The other name that I was given, I also love, but have a fraught relationship with. It is my Chinese name — 诗美, or formally 翁诗美.
This name was given to me by both my Hainanese grandfather and my parents. 翁 (weng, anglicised to Ong) is the family name. It means wealth. 诗 (shi) means ‘poetry’ and it is a character that is present in the names of all the children from my generation on my father’s side. My brothers are 诗杨 (shi yang) and 诗威 (shi wei)
In Hainanese naming tradition, the eldest son of the eldest son picks 4 characters every four generations and passes them down. Each succeeding generation taking the next character on the list — until it comes time to pick another 4 characters. My father is the eldest son of the third generation; my younger brother is the eldest son of the fourth. The honour (and responsibility) to carry on this tradition will rest on him, and he will pick the next 4 characters to be passed on.
The last character, 美 (mei), is mine, and it means ‘beauty’.
诗美 — beautiful poetry, is my name. It connects me to my family — immediate and extended. It also connects me to my past, my ancestors and a land that I have yet to return and visit — I am part of the diaspora of a larger diaspora.
My relationship with my Chinese name is fraught because my parents barely speak Mandarin. My father spoke mostly Hainanese to his parents, and learnt English and Malay in school. My mother spoke English to her parents, and a bit of Cantonese to her nanny growing up. While she studied Mandarin in school, she was not fluent in it. She did, however, hire a tutor and pick it up later in life for business/work purposes. My brothers and I grew up speaking English exclusively at home. The only people who called us by our Chinese names were our Chinese-language teachers in school. We were not good students in the eyes of our Mandarin teachers.
One of the first things you do as a migrant is fill in forms. A lot of forms. Forms to set up a bank account; forms to transfer your driver’s license; forms to apply for rentals, water, electricity, mobile plans…. and so on. Some of these forms are pretty important, particularly identity documents, as they will colour every administrative experience that you will have henceforth in your new country of residence.
Chinese names, written formally, always have the surname in front — (翁)诗美. It is never written the other way round — 诗美(翁) - it would not make any sense this way. This is why my full name has always either been written as ‘Deborah Ong Shi Mei’ or ‘Ong Shi Mei Deborah’. The latter is how it appears on my passport.
It is important to note that it is never written ‘Deborah, Shi Mei Ong’ or ‘Ong, Deborah Shi Mei’, as these cause the full Chinese name to be split up and thus make no sense. Shi Mei is not a ‘middle name’. It is a second name.
When I first applied for my learner’s permit in Australia at the age of 18, the instructions on the form told me to fill in my name as it appears on my passport. So I did. I then sat down to wait for my card to be printed.
After a few moments I heard someone calling, “SHI!”. “SHI ONG?” “SHI ONG!”
I looked around the room and no one was budging. Surely it couldn’t be?
I went up to the lady and asked if she was calling me. She looked at me and said, “well that’s your name isn’t it?”
I tried to explain to her that my name was Deborah. She said that it was my third name and there was only space on the card for a first name and a two initials.
I tried to explain that Deborah was indeed my first name, and that Shi Mei was my Chinese name.
She told me it couldn’t be my first name because it was the third name on my passport.
I THEN tried to come to a compromise and said, “if you’re going to use my Chinese name, could you at least put it in as ‘Shi Mei’ with ‘D’ as an initial?”
She insisted that ’Shi’ was one name because if it wasn’t, I should have had a hyphen in between ‘Shi’ and ‘Mei’. (which is completely not how Chinese characters WORK, but I wasn’t about to get into this with someone who clearly just wanted me to drop the subject)
So that’s how, for twelve years, the name on my license read: SHI M D ONG. A name that bears absolutely zero resemblance to anything I have ever identified with. A half-name that is not even my own, and that I share with all the siblings and cousins from my generation.
Over fifteen years, I slowly developed anxiety around anything to do with official paperwork. It was an absolute nightmare. My Singaporean documents didn’t match up with my driver’s license; which didn’t match up with my bank accounts; which didn’t coincide with the name I used on a day-to-day basis.It took me two years after I had been granted permanent residency to sort out my medicare card because the thought of having to deal with it stressed me out so much.
Every three years, when renewing my license, I would request for it to be changed. I got knocked back five times over fifteen years. An extra bonus time for when I took a motorcycle test and added that onto my license.
It was only at the end of 2019, when I had all but given up, that my husband prompted me to ask this lovely man in the Sunshine branch of VicRoads if he could please look into changing the name on my license. He smiled and said, “sure, of course! Just bring in your passport and I should be able to sort it out.”
My heart skipped a beat.
I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I sped home to get my passport and drove back within the hour. When I handed over my passport, he gave me a few forms to fill in. I saw him ask a colleague for advice — a grumpy looking, older lady — and she scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Singapore. You need to call the Singaporean embassy and verify that.” So he called them and sorted all of it out in less than half an hour.
When I saw my name — Deborah — printed on that small card, I was not ready for the swell of emotions that hit me. I managed to offer a very blubbery ‘thank you’ to the amazing human being who went out of his way to help me regain my identity and the sense that I actually belonged in this country.
He just smiled and said to me, in heavily accented English, “I understand”. Of course, he was a migrant too.
I am not alone in my frustrations. I have spoken to so many migrants that find it impossible to make their naming traditions conform to the First/Middle/Surname fields that are standard in this country. It is also not just people with Chinese names that have this issue.
Names are important. They connect us to culture, tradition, family and our own individual identity. When you take away someone’s name, or the agency for them to nominate how they are addressed, it can be extremely de-humanising. Simple solutions include having first/second/third name fields on forms, and having an option to select a preferred name if transferring a name from an official document like a passport. Training should also be provided to administrative staff, particularly those who deal with identification documents.
If we are serious about celebrating diversity and multiculturalism in Australia, then we need to take a serious look at our forms and systems, and understand the kind of message it sends to people who do not conform to White, Anglo-Saxon norms.
