Abstract
What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, we examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, we find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. We address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.
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Notes
The dominance of the English language and American culture is such that few American students in China or international workers create unique Chinese language names, identify with the names that they are given, or see these names as anything other than functional for communication. Many “Chinese” names are merely transliterations of English language names, thus, functionally the same name.
Since 2014, undergraduate enrollment among Chinese international students in the United States has surpassed that of graduates. The number of those Chinese students attending high schools in America rose from 637 in 2005 to 46,125 in 2015; these families are often in the top 5% or even the top 1% in China (see also Tu 2020).
Only one of our interviewees is from the working class. At an earlier age, she believed that English names could help “elevate one’s class” in social interaction. According to a survey conducted by Purdue University’s Center on Religion and Chinese Society in 2016, the majority of the Chinese students in America were from well-off families, as more than 90% of the respondents’ fathers had high-paying jobs.
Over 70% of students surveyed report that their Chinese names contain letters or sounds such as “x, j, q, r, c, z, zh, ch,” which are difficult for Americans to pronounce. Around 50% suggest pronunciation is one of the reasons why they adopted an English name.
For those whose given names consisting of solo Chinese character, they must be addressed using the full name or along with another character—the latter case often becomes an intimate nickname. As such, one cannot simply call someone “Ying” or “Si” in Chinese contexts; it has to be “D. Ying” (family name + given name) or “Sisi.”
This reminds us of the role of belief. Giselle is currently more popular than Tiffany.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ezra W. Zuckerman, Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Tianlong You, and the Qualitative Sociology reviewers and editors for their insightful comments on previous drafts.
Funding
This work was supported by the MacArthur Summer Research Grant at Northwestern University.
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Fang, J., Fine, G.A. Names and Selves: Transnational Identities and Self-Presentation among Elite Chinese International Students. Qual Sociol 43, 427–448 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09468-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09468-7