DAN!!!
To fit in, or to fit me in, my parents changed my name.

See, as some of you may be aware, me and my brother are of mixed-race heritage, and once my dad had done a runner with the housekeeping, my mum felt a little worried that our background would be the source of much heartache on our parts.

So she decided that when I went to 'big school' - I would be called something different. I was white after all, so I was given a 'British' name as a forename, and my true name was shoved to the middle.

Good idea, you think, right? Wrong. For a start my mates wondered why all the teachers were calling me something different from what they'd called me all their lives, teachers were bewildered at parents evening when my mum was still calling me by my proper name (silly cow), and there were rumours going around the neighbourhood that our identities were changed because we'd done something nasty or something nasty had been done to us (this had previous - a significant number of kids on our estate had fled from abusive homes and were given new identities to stop their pasts coming back to haunt them).

I hated it, there was a sense of detachment from who I was, and as I grew older, and joined university, I decided to embrace the old me and went back to my old, Muslim name.

I've never looked back. I'm proud of my heritage and I don't care what people think of my name. If they've got a problem with it, it's theirs, not mine.

I don't feel any resentment towards my mum for doing it - she had the right intentions - but that teenage identity crisis sure helped my pathway to therapy.
(scentless_apprentice takes two bottles into the shower!, Tue 20 Jan 2009, 18:17, 4 replies)

Just what you need as a teenager
Less of an idea about who you are.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Tue 20 Jan 2009, 18:26, closed)

Usually when choosing a 'british' name.
People seem to come up with crazy names which do NOT go with their second name.

Frank Sui for example, Arnold Wong is another, i could go on.
( Nathanial Hornblower, Tue 20 Jan 2009, 18:58, closed)

It's just as annoying to get some stupid nickname or to have your real name mispronounced all the time.

It's more of a case-by-case basis.

If my last name was Wong, but I was born in an english speaking country, it would make sense, especially in, for example, the cultural melting pot of the United States, to have an english name such as Arnold.

There are worse things to be called.
(Sco smokes crack often., Tue 20 Jan 2009, 22:21, closed)

For many years
It has been traditional for Chinese familys to give an extra english first name to children for them to use in dealings with western society.
( RadG Drinking Mojitos in the sun, Wed 21 Jan 2009, 9:19, closed)