Being Chinese | A Chinese Singaporean’s first-world dilemma: should I change my surname?
My grandparents lost their original surnames by force of circumstance. Now that I have the luxury of choice, do I restore my family name?
I turned 30 on December 15. That morning, I got a text reminder from the Singapore government that I would need a new photo for my identity card. But renewing the card would also mean having to decide whether to change my surname.
My surname today, Ang, is actually not mine by lineage. By blood, I am a Koh. My great-grandmother married a Koh and they had two sons. After his untimely demise, she married an Ang – a man she never had children with. But under social pressure, she changed the surname of one son so that her new husband’s family name could continue.
When my grandfather, a sailor, returned from sea one day to find his name altered by a municipal office clerk, he didn’t reverse the change; he was still single and didn’t think there would be implications. That was before the Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. Later in life, he told his children the story, but by then, changing the surname back seemed too complicated.
My father and his siblings already had children – my two cousins, my brother and me – in school. The paperwork and explanations seemed more trouble than they were worth, so Ang stuck.
In Chinese culture, surnames carry immense historical and cultural weight. They are among the oldest hereditary traditions in the world, with roots going back more than 2,000 years. Bai Jia Xing – the “hundred family surnames” compiled into a text during the Song dynasty – reflects how surnames were both a marker of kinship and social order.