主题：【原创】浅议--北美个别中国人改名字的习惯 -- oiler2

Dr. Ann Aungles

When my mother was a young girl, her father was killed in a work

accident on the London Docks. Her mother, unable to care for five

children, sent three of them, my mother and a younger brother and

sister to be looked after in an orphanage. The year was 1910.

At that time orphanages in England had two major functions: to care

for the children and to fill the constant demand for trained domestic

servants. Eventually, in 1916 my mother, then fourteen years old,

became a housemaid in a castle in Scotland. The lady of the house

instructed the housekeeper that this new young servant was to be known

as "Florrie" instead of her own name "Florence".

This was not a gratuitious unkindness. It was the standard of the

day. The upper classes regularly renamed their servants with names to

fit their "servant class" which were the lesser beings in the

household.

Renaming, of course, was also a feature of slavery and servitude in

Australia and in the USA. Today Afro-American and indigenous

Australian historians record this enforced cultural dispossession of

their grand parents and great grandparents as a significant aspect of

the gross racism of that era.

So it is a shock to some visiting lecturers in Beijing that students

are willing to adopt English names. Names are loaded with symbolism,

sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Yet the connotations attached

to any one name may not be clear unless one has lived in the country

from which it has been derived. But how are students to know the

subtleties of naming without fully participating in the life and

culture that create these complex layers of meaning?

The results can be disturbing. There is an unease in speaking with

a sophisticated, wise, mature young person whose name would be used

only by children in England or societies of instant disposability. In

some ways names are like clothes. Out-of-date names can be an awful

embarrassment to young adults.

I am glad that I do not have to take on a name whose cultural

underpinnings are a mystery to me. However, it would be good to know

what students feel about their English names. Is renaming a pleasure

or an inconvenience? Does it instill a sense of alienation and

cultural dispossession or of cultural advantage? Or is taking on an

English name simply an insignificant aspect of being an English

Learner in China?