KAM PUI-FAN CHOSE Apple as her English name when she was in kindergarten. Now, the name is part of her identity. 'Everyone calls me Apple, even my mother and father,' says Kam, 24, a customer care manager at Fitness First's Quarry Bay gym. 'Some people don't like to be called by their Chinese names. They think they're not modern. People think, if you have an English name, you're very fashionable and trendy.'
Hongkongers from their teens to their 40s are using English names more often, reserving their Chinese given names for parents, other relatives and close friends - or not using them at all. Having an easily pronounceable English or other foreign name (Japanese names are all the rage) has become so de rigueur that many young couples are bestowing them on their children at birth, rather than waiting for the child's school to make the standard request.
Meanwhile, Hongkongers, particularly women, are increasingly turning from mundane monikers to colourful handles such as Hillbilly, Rainbow, Onion and Chlorophyll.
After the handover, some sociologists and other observers expected people to shed their foreign names. In fact, the trend in Hong Kong mirrors a mini-trend on the mainland, in which more people are assuming non-Chinese names to use in increasingly prevalent English classes and international workplaces (although rarely in social situations with other Chinese).
In a recent study of 340 university students, sociologist Annie Chan Hau-nung (whose first name was chosen by nuns at her Catholic school) found that 93 per cent of the respondents had English names and almost 25 per cent of those had chosen unconventional names. An assistant professor of applied sociology at Lingnan University, Chan says people are following the logic of the Chinese-naming system, in which no special words or characters are assigned for names.
'Parents will start giving their children who are attending kindergarten English names, which was practically unheard of 20 years ago,' Chan says. 'Twenty or 30 years ago, most of the people who had English names had contact with English speakers in their work, but nowadays you get people who don't even speak English and will have English names. The proportion is much higher.'