Disambiguating the Term “Chinese”: An Analysis of Chinese American Surname Naming Practices

Abstract

Abstract The term “Chinese” can refer to an ethnicity, a group of people, or language(s). This conflation makes disentanglement especially difficult, yet not disambiguating perpetuates an oversimplification of a nation, languages, peoples, and cultures. While this blanket term collapses plurality into a monolithic entity, the converse seems to hold when looking at Romanized naming practices of Chinese Americans. The alphabetic rendition of Chinese American names draws relatively clear boundaries of country of origin and general time of arrival to the United States. This paper problematizes the term “Chinese” and looks at the Chineses like Cantonese and Hoisan-wa, which have long overlooked histories in the United States and hold critical clues to disambiguating the cultural and linguistic pluralities of what many would lump together as an immutable term. These findings have implications for using this naming phenomenon to raise linguistic awareness and for the teaching of Chinese American history.