For Simplicity’s Sake

Dear Ms. Betty Brown (R-TX),

Your recent statement about how Asian-Americans should change their names to ones that are easier to pronounce during House testimony on voter identification legislation is not only insulting towards Asian-Americans, but also to the people you represent in Texas. Your assumption that Asian-American names are the only foreign names that are hard for the average English speaker to mispronounce is ignorant, and demonstrates your lack of cultural and awareness about the diversity on which the United States prides itself. Furthermore, your belief that citizens should change their name for the convenience of poll workers and other civil servants shows that you see poll workers as lazy and/or ignorant and do not possess the intelligence required to identify one person from another.

You are quoted as saying, “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?” Yes, Chinese is a difficult language to learn, one of the most difficult, in fact. However, if one’s name is in a language other than English, the English speaker is not required to learn the language that the name is in, they only need to learn the name. There are plenty of Asian-American celebrities that have had their names recognized by the American public without having to change their names so that they could be dealt with “more readily” in the States – Kelly Hu, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Ang Lee, to name a few. I doubt that all of the American people who are familiar with these aforementioned celebrities as well as other famous Asian-Americans became fluent in Chinese before learning how to pronounce their names.

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Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.