I am a name snob

I have lived in the USA for 10 years, and during this time I have seen Chinese friends modify their names from Jie to Jay, or Xiang to Shang for the Caucasian majority they live within. Japanese names are easier but are often shortened from Takahiro to Tak, or from Kazuhiko to Kaz. I have always insisted that people use my full Chinese name (I don’t have a Western name), even if they mangle the pronounciation. In my mind, a bad-sounding version of my real name is better than a perfect pronounciation of a Western moniker.

I love my name, and I love that my parents took great pains to select it for me. I love the aspirations that my parents had for me, all bound lovingly into two characters. Even if my mail comes with my name misspelt, or my new friend trips over the syllabi when they try to call me, I will insist on using the name my parents gave me. Even if it sounds foreign, my American friends think it sounds beautiful. Even if they don’t know what it means, they are envious when I explain it to them.

Lee Wei Ling caused a little bit of a stir when she wrote in a column that choosing unique Westernized names was a reflection of narcissism. While I don’t think she should interfere with other people’s choices of names for themselves or their children, I am secretly in agreement with her. It irks me a little when I look down the class roster of my young cousin. Her classmates run the gamut of Reuben, Aloysius, Atticus and Keisha to Byron, Floyd and Scott. I often wonder, do Singaporeans know the origins of these names? What kind of a person do they imagine when they think of a Reuben? No offense to the reubens out there, but I see a reuben sandwich being eaten by a cherubic white boy. Racist? Probably. But I can’t help what I think.

Along these lines, studies have shown that employers in the US subconsciously reject more resumes from Keishas, Demarcus and the likes. These names are associated with African-Americans names. The moral of the story is, that while we are all free to choose our names and our children’s names, we cannot control what others think about the name. My first impressions of Reuben Tan will be someone hailing from a nouveau-riche family. Florabelles will conjure up images of uneducated parents. I am a name snob, but I’m glad you couldn’t tell that from looking at my name.

Where do the brightest go?

In the days of feudal Japan, your fate was determined by the family you were born into. If your father was a farmer, you would not imagine a different occupation for yourself. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, himself the protagonist a rags-to-riches story, rose from a farmer to the regent of Japan. And yet, he wrote a law forbidding farmers from becoming samurai, ultimately rigidifying the class boundaries. Despite all its failings, this system did ensure that there were enough farmers who provided food, skilled craftsmen who produced goods, merchants who facilitated trade and samurai who kept peace.

Let’s fast forward now to our modern day. Rigid class boundaries have mostly fallen and we are only bounded by the rules of meritocracy. One can dream of being a poet, an engineer, a teacher or even an astronaut. In an ideal world, we would expect the population to spread itself evenly out over an array of occupations. This means that within the smartest group of people, we should be able to find a variety of dream jobs. Yet in the era of hyper-inflated bonuses on Wall Street, we find the best and brightest flocking to finance. Is it possible that all these people truly love finance? Is finance really superior to all the other fields?

As a libertarian, I believe that what careers others pick should be up to them. However, from the standpoint of a citizen, what others pick does concern me. I want the best civil engineers to build the bridges I use every day to get to work. I want the best researchers to search for the cures to old-age diseases that will hurt me in 30 years. I want the best teachers to educate the young so my country has a better future. That is simply not possible if our best and brightest are all flocking into finance. I see it all around me. Physicists with PhDs sucked up by Wall Street to build ever more complex financial models. Engineers, economists, English majors, you name it. A few years ago, I even knew a Dance major who joined one of the investment banks. The rationale is that as long as you were smart, you could be trained to do the job. Maybe the Dance major found out in college she wasn’t cut out to be a dancer. Perhaps she is indeed happier as a investment banker. Whatever her reasons are, I fear she is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The same situation exists in Singapore, perhaps to a greater extent. The brightest who so happen to be rich, are able to fund their own overseas education. Those who do return tend to end up in finance. The brightest who aren’t as rich find themselves serving out a stint in the civil service to pay off their overseas scholarships. The skew in the job choices of the brightest is institutional, which makes it all the more laughable when Singapore talks about creating the next Bill Gates or Nobel laureate. Things became slightly better when Singapore decided a large push towards pharmaceutical and biomedical gadgets was essential to replace the flagging semiconductor industry. Science became ever slightly ‘cooler’.

Will Singapore ever produce a Nobel laureate? Probably not in my life time. The US could also lose its science and technological supremacy, but that is less likely to happen as she will always attract some of the brightest in the world to her shores. Similarly, Singapore is trying to attract top talent to her shores, but this can only be a stopgap measure. What we need now, is to build up our own diversified talent pool. The excuse that Singapore is too small to allow diversification is bollocks. Just look at Iceland.