The “Western Name” thing also happens with Blacks in South Africa, usually given or chosen on starting school. Although that’s thankfully on the way out now.
I don’t think anyone would use an English name when actually speaking Chinese - because of the alphabet issue apart from anything else (ie, the fact that there isn’t one). It’s the Coca-cola/bite the wax tadpole problem, essentially. You’d have to figure out what real Chinese words you were going to map to the sounds “Ca” and “rie”, what tones to use for them …it would be weird. Especially when you’ve got a perfectly functional Chinese name that could be used instead.
The other interesting question though, is how much of your time you get to spend speaking a Chinese dialect when you’re boss of Hong Kong. Because I imagine there’d be good reason to be in English quite often. Not just if there’s any monoglot English speaker in the room, but anyone from Malaysia. Or Singapore. Or India. Cantonese is not a great international language. Uni Hong Kong (Ms Lam’s alma mater) teaches in English, and so does her other alma mater (Cambridge ;)) . I imagine she’d just auto-translates her name when swapping languages, like you’d do any word, and she’s probably really really good at it by now.
Was the factory owner officially the Chairman of the Board of Directors? In Spanish, formal address is officially by job title: if I write an instancia (an official letter) to the Ministry of Agriculture, it will be addressed to the Muy Excelentísimo Señor Ministro even though the Muy Excelentísimo will probably never read it and may prefer to be called Paco. My brother recently got certified as a teacher and that required some teaching time, which he got by subbing in our former HS (St Francis Xavier); he discovered that the best way to get the principal to pay attention was to address him formally: “disculpe, señor director…” “AAAARGH! Don’t call me señor anything! That’s my dad!” “Your dad isn’t a jesuit, I hope. Now, regarding this…”
It’s not just a Chinese thing – I know some Indian people who use “American” names, as well.
When my mother worked at the local university, several of her foreign students used “American” names, claiming that Americans had a hard time pronouncing or remembering their real names. So one Chinese woman became “Mabel”.
Now that one really might be an America-specific thing - I don’t think I can ever remember meeting an Indian person in either Oz or the UK who’d shifted their name for international consumption
I’d say a minority of Indian-Americans ditch their Indian names entirely in favor of Westernized names as their legal names. Almost all the Chinese and Korean-Americans I know have Westernized names as their legal names.
Really? I haven’t run into that yet, and I’ve worked with dozens of Indian people. In my experience, it’s almost exclusively a Chinese thing- I was actually surprised in graduate school when several of the Chinese students went by their actual names instead of English adopted names.
I have however, met several second or third generation immigrants of various nationalities who have given their kids standard US english names, despite relatively recent descent from somewhere else.
And anglicization of names from elsewhere seems to be VERY common, especially among native-born people of other nationalities- I’ve known plenty of Mexican-American guys who were named Roy (Rogelio), Dave (David), Ray (Ramon), Billy (Guillermo), etc…
I’m not Indian, but my wife is. I know a couple of Indian-Americans who use a Westernized nickname, but generally only when they’re among English-only speakers. Like, I know a Parvathi who goes by Pat at work, and a Katen who goes by Keith sometimes. But that’s not very common in my experience, and they just use them as nicknames not legal names.
It all makes sense now…
Teacher: From now on, you shall be known as “Dibble.”
Student: But Dibble isn’t a real…
Teacher: YOU’RE DIBBLE!
I’ve met Māori people in New Zealand with an English name and Māori name, which they switched depending on audience. I guess using both is kind of signalling group membership to two different cultural groups for some people, as well as a pronunciation thing.
I guess I’m the only one who thinks it’s her surname that’s surprising. It seems unusual to me that she changed her surname when she married. None of the Chinese people I know (including some from Hong Kong) did that. But I don’t know any that married under British law, maybe that makes a difference.
I’ve known at least two people who came from India that use “Westernized” names. One was a woman who called herself “Daisy”, although her original Indian name was by no means difficult to pronounce or remember. the other was a man whose Westernized name was similar to his real name. I have no idea why they chose to do this. (The two cases have nothing to do with each other; they’re well separated in space and time.)
My experience in London is that nicknames for ethnic Indians are common, but separate different language names such as the practice in China is not. Mo as a nickname for Mohammed is nearly ubiquitous. Sandy for Sandeep is another one. And I never met him in person, but I knew an outsourcer named Parikshit that preferred to be called Perry on conference calls.
There are also Indians from a Catholic background who have western names because they were named after biblical figures.
It was actually pretty common in our workplace. “something something Robert something something some.” The western name really becomes a piece of their identity for many of them. My wife certainly considers her western name as the name she identifies with, and her brothers and sisters use it, too rather than her given name.
I was with a group of Chinese on a lake boat this weekend (here, in the USA), and while I can’t say I didn’t hear any Chinese names mentioned, I know for a fact that they used western names while speaking Chinese (in particular, the two teenagers, who are fully multilingual).
On a side note, sometimes names become really, really popular. In my office in China, I started a tradition in the vein of “Little Shop of Horrors.” I think we were up to Maggie 6 by time I repatriated. It was especially funny when I started to hear a name+number used in a Chinese conversation by the Chinese, although it made me feel a little bit bad, as I didn’t mean to dehumanize anyone.
Not only biblical ones: other saints’ names such as Francisco and Xavier can be heard, specially around Goa.
Hebrew and Greek names are Western, now? 
I was still hoping for even rough statistics, since my experience seems to be different: if you could not pronounce (say) Amit, Adhishesha, Preeti, Anjanaparvan, or Bhuvaneshwari it was always your problem, and I never was offered an alternative name. These were not people I met in or who grew up in London, though.
Maybe there is a colonialism (or anti-colonialism) thing going on regarding India, South Africa, and Hong Kong? Similarly, how many Vietnamese go by French, Chinese, or American names?
We had a fellow named Sam working as one of our network techs. During a get-to-know-everyone retreat once upon a time in the early 2000’s, one thing that came up was “tell us something about yourself that many others probably don’t know”.
For his turn, he said, “Most people probably don’t know this, but my name is short for Osama.”
His co-workers, who obviously did know, launched into a chorus of “Ohhh…sama, oh, sama…” to the tune of Richie Valens’ “Oh, Donna”.
That’s pretty common here too- maybe not quite as common as over there, but common enough. I’ve known a couple of Mo/Mohammeds and a Jags/Jagadeesh in the past few years- no Sandy/Sandeeps yet though.
I do see that smiley, but I’m not sure what the joke is. Of course, Hebrew and Greek names are Western. They have been for at least two millennia.
Jonathan, Jacob, Andrew, Phillip – is there any question that Hebrew and Greek names like these are Western?
Moreover, what are the ancient Hebrew and Greek civilizations if they’re not part of the development of Western culture? They certainly aren’t Eastern.
Looking at it from a standpoint of religious tradition, the three extant large Western religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
I have a Korean friend named Annie and Vietnamese friends named Bruce and Emily, which I doubt are Korean or Vietnamese names.