{"id":310,"date":"2008-04-05T12:59:39","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T05:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/?p=310"},"modified":"2008-04-05T21:21:34","modified_gmt":"2008-04-05T14:21:34","slug":"name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/name\/","title":{"rendered":"name."},"content":{"rendered":"

I envy Ed McGowin<\/a>, who changed his name twelve times, perhaps without hesitation, or with such a strong determination that nothing could have stood in his way. I don’t know which of the conditions was true for him, but if I would want to change my name for even once, I would fret. <\/p>\n

I heard that the Chinese, like the Javanese, amongst many, regard their names very highly. I heard that there’s even a Chinese idiom that says, “One is not afraid to be born with a bad destiny but to be given a bad name.” These, however, are not the reasons of my fretting the idea of changing my name legally. <\/p>\n

For me, this name change business has always been shrouded in bureaucracy, something that has given me such a deeply-buried aura of trauma. There’s a sense of guilt that has always accompanied it: ‘one changes one’s name because one is guilty.’ Add to this an irrational dread of government officers. Once I remembered thinking, on my way to the immigration office after incidentally losing my passport, “it’s not like they’re going to eat me. Eating human is … unlawful. And I’m human. Am I?”<\/p>\n

My parents, though, changed their name. Were they guilty? Am I a daughter of runaway convicts? During his time of being a stateless in China and France after 1965, Sobron Aidit had 25 names: Chang Wen Sung was one of them. His daughter, born in Beijing as Wanita Tekun Pertiwi, had to change her name so many times that she couldn’t remember them all. She ended up with Anita Sobron, a name she chose upon being naturalized as French citizen. A friend of mine, a supposedly open-minded artist, couldn’t believe me when I answered to his question, that I, like him, never had a Chinese name. He simply couldn’t believe me, that’s it, and the dialogue ended there, awkwardly waiting for my courage to challenge his notion of my Chineseness. I gave up, it was too awkward, and I didn’t know enough of why things happened to even start explaining to him that one’s slanted eyes don’t always equal one’s nationalism or loyalty. <\/p>\n

I, on the other hand, cannot believe that my legal, paper, documented Catholic name is my original name. I have always known myself with my nickname, Tintin, and only found out about my legal name when I started to read, 6-odd years into my life. For me, my paper name is not my name. It’s merely a paper name. It’s much too foreign to me.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time I think about this. This is, however, definitely the first time I write about this. And it is really not easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I envy Ed McGowin, who changed his name twelve times, perhaps without hesitation, or with such a strong determination that nothing could have stood in his way. I don’t know which of the conditions was true for him, but if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-2-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}