Zooey: Question on Asian name order.

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  • June 20, 2020 at 1:01 pm #116854
    Avatar photoBilly_T
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    If memory serves, you lived in Thailand for a time. Do you know of any easy to remember rule of thumb for name order in Asian countries?

    I recently finished a really good novel, The Mountains Sing, by a Vietnamese poet, and I’ve seen her name in all kinds of different ways. I think the correct way is Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, but I’ve seen it reversed, or mixed-reversed. Same goes for film directors, like Wong Kar-Wai, etc.

    I used to read a lot of Japanese authors, and have recently gotten back into that. One of my favorites is Dazai Osamu. In some library search engines, you can’t find him that way, but you can if you type in Osamu Dazai. Not sure which is the correct one. He had a daughter who was also a writer. Qiu Miaojin. I recently read her extraordinary Last Words From Montmarte and hope my library adds her other novel to its e-book list. Wikipedia shows her as Chiu Miao-Chin and Qiu Miaojin. The former isn’t the way it shows up in library searches.

    And by “correct,” I mean the way they form their own names, of course, not the way the West may want to form them, etc.

    Thanks in advance.

    June 21, 2020 at 1:27 pm #116912
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    Thailand uses the same name order that the west uses. Every country I spent any extensive time in did the same.

    So I don’t know anything about it.

    I have known a few people named Nguyễn. It’s a family name. Whether it comes first or last in Vietnam, I don’t know, but in the US, they use it last. That may be because they are adopting American name practices, though, to avoid confusion.

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