Only anecdotal evidence here, but I have come across many chinese people (living in the US) who have “American” names.
I have seen this especially wrt Chinese and much less so for people from other nations. Obviously, it is more convinient to have an American sounding name, but I then why is it that the Chinese are more likely to do so ?
Because Chinese names are particularly likely to get mangled by Americans, and because Chinese names get confused with other Chinese names – in the Western ear, Western names stand out better.
It’s not just in the US. One of my wife’s uncles was chinese by birth, he cubanized his chinese name, and every one of his kids had an equally Cuban first name, with a chinese last name.
I don’t agree with your premise.
Are you talking about Chinese-born immigrants who took an English-language name when they came to the U.S., or are you talking about persons of Chinese ancestry?
If you’re talking about U.S. born ethnic Chinese, it was not unusual for immigrants or their children to give their offspring English-sounding names, the better to fit in in the country. You just don’t think of it that way with people of Spanish, German, Italian or Slavic descent.
As I have noted previously, Mrs. Kunilou’s family came from Japan at about the same time mine came from Europe. The Midwestern branch all gave their kids English names, while the California branch mixed in some Japanese first names for some of their kids.
And of course, my grandparents gave all their children English first names.
At one time, I worked with an older Chinese couple named “Mike” and “Betty” Yee. They were college professors in China who had come to the USA as adults, and were reduced to working as unskilled office clerks.
Comes the day for “Mike” to retire. At his retirement party he gave this speech:
{heavy accent}
When I come to America, I know I need American name. So, I ask the first man I meet, “What is a good American name?”
He tells me. “Mike. Mike is a good American name.”
But “Mike” is not a good name for me. Why? Because everywhere I go, people are calling out, “Mike! Mike!” I turn around but they don’t want me, they want some other Mike.
So, after that, when I hear people calling out, “Mike! Mike!”, I don’t turn around. But they really want me, now they think I’m stuck up!
So, “Mike” is not a good name for me.
Ever notice, and this is possibly just my narrow observation, but every Asian that has Americanized his or her name seems to pick a name with an ‘R’ or 'L ’ in it.?
Bwuce. Woberta. Erizabeff.
Which is all fine, as I am pretty sure my chinese name would be Moo Goo Gai Pan 
Why do American people choose weird names?
Only anecdotal evidence here, but I have come across many American people (living in China) who have names from Chinese menus.
I have seen this especially wrt Americans and much less so for people from other nations. Obviously, it is more convenient to have an Chinese sounding name, but I then why is it that the Americans pick words that seem to come from menus from Chinese restaurants in America??
Seriously, it’s because we want to fit in. I am one of those Chinese people who took an American name when I moved here. People here could not pronounce my Chinese name. If I hadn’t switched, either I would have to suffer everyone’s well-meaning but mangled pronunciation, or I would have to endlessly correct people. I do not enjoy correcting people over and over. Later, I changed the pronunciation of my last name from “Schweei” to “Soo”, again to facilitate Western speakers. I think I have saved a non-trivial amount of time and effort by doing this.
I’m sure people in China would have trouble with a name such as “Shirley”, and each time they made a special effort to struggle with your name, you are reminded that you are different. So, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine someone preferring to go by “Moo Goo Gai Pan”.
Um, Shirley, you and so many other Americans have this tendency to toss all Asians together into one big pile.
Many of the Asian nationalities are more different from each other than the European countries, and we would never throw Italians, French, and British into a single pile.
In fact linguists recognize several different major language groups in Asia, whereas excepting Feno-Hungarian (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian) and the relatively small Basque-speaking population, Europe boast but one language group with three branches (I know, I know, Im forgetting Georgian, Latvian, et al. But we’re kind of moving into western Asia there).
That being said, its the Koreans and Japanese who have trouble with “L” and “R”. Chinese actually have an easier time (in my experience) learning the American “R” than most non-native English speaking westerners.
Chinese, however, have their own crop of problems.
Actually, Japanese have no problem with “R” since it is part of their alphabet (e.g., “ramen” is a Japanese word), although it is a rolled-R like in Spanish. “L,” on the other hand is not part of their alphabet so gets substituted with a rolled-R in most cases.
I think Chinese is the opposite with “L” being part of their alphabet, but not “R.”
I’ve actually heard it the other way around for Japanese. It depends on the person. I once dated a japanese guy who would pronounce his "r"s like "l"s.
I think they do it because it’s easier for everybody around them and it makes interactions easier. Not a bad idea, IMHO, if their original name is hard to pronounce. It probably aids in business and social interactions and makes it easier to make friends. If I moved to China or Korea or any place where people had serious trouble with my name, I’d probably do the same.
But I’d try to get some help picking it so I wouldn’t end up with a name like General Tso’s Chicken or something.
A question I’ve had along these lines is in regards to my observation that contrary to the anecdote above, “Mike” is not a common name for a child of immigrants. Here at Michigan, it seems as though a number of the Chinese or Chinese-American students who go by an English name have names that I consider classic and/or old-fashioned: Walter. Esther. Irene. Engelbert. Alice. Howard. Josephine. Susan. Grace. Eunice. Erwin. Albert.
Wondered why that was.
I’ve known people who worked in China who also “sino-ized” their names. Well, they took their American/European names and made a chinese name out of it by trying to match the syllables to the chinese language.
An acquaintances last name was Van Raijin, (sp?) an obviously Dutch sounding name. In chinese, she chose three characters that sounded approximate … Fong Wai Jin, something like that. She chose it because of the specific meaning of the words, it translated back to english as something she liked.
did I explain that correctly at all?
I’ll take a wild stab at this. It’s because people choose names they think sound classy and unique, to make them feel special.
Most Westerners would not know what a “normal” Chinese was, if they were trying to choose the equivalent of “Mike”. They might end up choosing a more classical name, such as “Confucious”, or they might pick a famous person such as “Yao Ming”… simply because they happen to be aware of these names, not that these are especially good choices.
Bilgerat:
Huh? The Japanese “r” isnt rolled. Where did you get THAT idea?
The Japanese ra ri ru re ro syllables are sort of between a single Spanish r (like pero, NOT the rolled perro), an l, and a d. Forced to say which one it sounded closest to I would have to say L.
As a native English speaker I have difficulty hearing the difference between a Japanese ra and da.
Id also like to point out that using L and R is an approximation from OUR perspective. To say that “Chinese is the opposite, with L being a part of their alphabet, but not R” is wrong. Wrong first of all because Chinese, like Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, etc etc doesnt use L or R at all, and second of all because (unlike other Asian languages) Chinese doesnt have any alphabet whatsoever! (This fact makes looking up a word in the dictionary a tricky task, requiring knowlege of character stroke number and order).
Cranky:
I dont know if this is the case at Michigan (UM, MU?) but where my girlfriend works – a Japanese car parts manufacturer – there are lots of Japanese businessmen. All of them take American names because 1) they feel Americans cant say their names correctly and 2) unlike in the US, very very very few people call them by anything but their “last” (family) names (nobody has mentioned this second reason for choosing American names, but I suspect it plays a role in some situations).
These Japanese businessmen take their names from a list of infrequently encountered American names – some I have met are “Kent”, “Neil”, and “Max”. The reason is so as not to take a name likely to be had by one of their American co-workers.
Ironically these guys, in the name of aiding communication with Americans, cant pronounce their “own” names! “Kento”, “Niru”, and “Makusu” to hear them say it.
regnad kcin, I’ve encountered an even stranger problem - when I was taking classes in German, I couldn’t pronounce my own name correctly when I was speaking German! It always came out as “Mot.” I guess having to get my mind around a German accent made me apply it to everything, including words that were not German.
I work for a Japanese company, although I can’t speak Japanese, but maybe I shed some light on the topic of Japanese accents. Japanese consonants are very different from English ones. They have one that seems to be midway between an r and an l, which does mean many native Japanese speakers have trouble pronouncing the two differently. It’s equally hard for native English speakers to figure out some of the Japanese consonants; one example that I’ve picked up sounds sort of like a ygh. Most of the Japanese at the company I work for have not adopted Americanized first names.
Back to the original post, many generations of immigrants to America have Anglicized their names when coming here. It’s just something we take for granted when it comes to white people, but many generations of Italians, Slavs, and other immigrants took more English sounding names too, and gave their children American sounding names. It just stands out more when we see Asians doing this.
And not many chinese will pick a name with an ‘S’ in it.
Okay, maybe not a hard-rolled R like in Spanish, maybe more like in Italian? Like in riggotoni. None the less it is a rolled “R.” I say this because I am Japanese, have an “R” in my last name (Harada), and have never had anyone of Japanese origin try to pronounce it as Ha-la-da. As for the “L” being substituted with an “R,” I’ve seen enough Japanese imports listing the material name as “prastic” to know its true. 
Of course there’s no accounting for individual pronounciation. But my mother-in-law (from Japan) would beg to differ that your co-workers were unable to properly pronounce their Japanese names.
Back to the topic at hand, I agree that someone from a foreign country would have little insight into the naming trends here. Their frame of reference is usually the media (movies, TV, etc.) so you tend to get the classic names (James, Mike, Tony, Joe, Sally, Mary, etc…).
And that would be “riggatoni”, duh…