You forgot Mongolia 
to the OP, it’s a fairly easy and obvious way to highlight the surname. I use it ALL the time with Chinese names.
I think from the above 2 person list that it should be obvious which is the family name and which is the given name. Otherwise, it might not be obvious to a non chinese speaker like yourself.
Yep, so do I …mostly because outlook sucks at ordering the names. Also, for chinese names its pretty much the only way to quickly know which is the correct name to use - as people do all sorts of funny things to orders, and different forms ask for the names in different orders.
That first line gets explained pretty much every time, but the last time I saw a woman under 60 do it was over 20 years ago, which leads us to the second line.
And we make things even more fun by having multi-word firstnames and family names…
Francisco Javier Martínez de Artola Satrústegui
would be treated by some computer systems as
Firstname Francisco
Middlename Javier
Family name Martínez
with the rest left out unless Mr. Martínez de Artola made a fuss about it. But it’s actually
Firstname Francisco Javier (the Javier acts as a specifier of which of several Saint Francis is this man’s patron, a noun acting as adjective if you wish; neither Javier nor Borja can be given independently, they automatically make the bearer a Francisco)
First family name Martínez de Artola
Second (dropped out abroad for most purposes) Satrústegui
Being female and having a Commonlastname de Place lastname such as that one, I’ve had people think I was married, including a couple of foreigners who insisted in telling me that what I was telling them (“no, I’m not married, those three words are my family name”) was impossible because “Hispanic women take their husband’s lastname with a ‘de’”… clue by 4 applied to forehead A mechanism to mark “this whole mess is my lastname” such as putting that part in all-caps comes in handy when I can use it.
To me the given name is the primary identifier. Since there’s a high likelihood that people with the same family name will be sharing a residence or even place of business, it makes sense to emphasize the first name when addressing mail, for example.
groman, it’s probably different in San José, but my college class of 79 students had 6 or 8 (I’d have to look at class pics) Jorges and Jordis. My ~40 student classes, grades 5-8, had 5 Francisco Javier and 4 variants of Miguel. My firstname is relatively inusual, as is my first lastname. I’m the only person with my first lastname in my client’s email list (over 50K entries); there are 12 women with my firstname, and 3 of them work in my same building. When that’s what you’re used to, using the firstname as the primary identifier simply Does Not Work.
That may work for a single family home or a Mom-and-Pop business, but in an apartment building or a business of any significant size it’s almost guaranteed that there will be many more Johns and Marys than there are people of any given surname. (At least in the US, and probably many other countries.) So it’s not surprising that your practice is not normally followed by most people.