Chapter 1: The Art of the Middle Name

Prelude

I am an alien of the terrestrial kind.

In 2008, I landed on the United States of America to learn the ways of the Far West. 

Readers, note that this was not my first encounter with United States Ideology. I had been trained for this mission since before I was born: 200 years ago, 15,300 kilometers (sorry, 9,500 miles) away, when my ancestors in Singapore were colonized by the British Empire. At the time, it was considered a Truly Great Honour to receive the teachings of the British Empire. The best and brightest of my ancestors ensured that English, the sacred tongue through which one accessed the ideas of the Empire, was passed down systematically from one generation to the next.

Exhibit 1: My predecessors in Western attire of the 1960s, bidding goodbye to colonization. 

Naturally, I became a native speaker of English. But the Empire had long ceased to exist. In its place was its cool, rebellious offspring: the USA. Enthralled, I attempted to practice the ways of the American (1). From my daily after-school rituals of blasting American rock music, to making seasonal pilgrimages to the Costco (wow, we sure were blessed to have one within driving distance), to writing a high school treatise on "the hippie movement", I was a Padawan dying to become Jedi Knight--and I hadn't even watched Star Wars. 

But my peers and I knew that the American we practiced was impure. It was bastardized, diluted with the uncouth habits and rituals of our "local culture." To achieve true enlightenment and official recognition of our American mastery, and thus be able to earn higher wages than our contemporaries, we had to travel to the source itself.

And so, with some official-looking documents and my status in the "upper middle class", my journey began.

Woohoo! Can't wait to learn the ancient mystic arts of the Far West.

(1) Apologies to the entire Americas, but I will henceforth refer to the ways & people of the USA as American until I find a better solution than USA-ian. 

I.  In which I discover my Alien identity and adopt an Alien Number.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services - Glossary 

Alien: 

Any person not a citizen or national of the United States.

A-Number/Alien Registration Number/Alien Number (A-Number or A#):
A unique seven-, eight- or nine-digit number assigned to a noncitizen by the Department of Homeland Security. 

II. In which I negotiate a Middle Name.

However prepared I thought I would be for my mission, I was bewildered from the start.

My years of training had somehow glossed over a cornerstone of American identity: possessing a conventional American name.

Apparently, across all popular usage and every legal & official document, the American name is conventionally formatted as such:

First Name + Middle Name + Last (Family) Name

But in my crimson Singapore passport and every identification document I possessed, this was my name:

KWEE TZE XIEN, REBECCA

Kwee is my family name, Tze Xien my Chinese first name, and Rebecca my English first name-- bestowed to me by my dear Christian parents, who named me after a biblical figure who married a man in a distant land without even meeting him once. 

It seemed obvious to me that I would put Kwee as my last name in all my official forms. But it took me a decade to figure out what to do with my two first names. In some forms, I put Rebecca as my first name and Tze Xien as my middle name. 

However, upon further reflection, I felt a strong sense of injustice that my Chinese first name, which held so much meaning and complexity, was reduced to a mere middle name by American naming standards. Fellow aliens, what even is a "middle name"? As someone who did not understand the history and conventions of a middle name, I viewed it as a lesser name, firstly because middle names are often given in honor of someone else instead of inherently representing the person themselves, and also because middle names often hide behind a mere "middle initial." 

I was not going to relegate my Chinese name to such inferior status! I thought. Doing so would effectively, symbolically, acknowledge my ethnic Chinese identity as less important than my English one.

And so, after much ado, I put Rebecca Tze Xien as my first name in some other documents.

But wait, maybe "Tze Xien Rebecca" would work better instead as it more closely matches the order in my passport? 

With dwindling levels of confidence, I put Tze Xien Rebecca in the remaining documents. 

That is, until I encountered character or space limits for first names in some documents. Apparently American first names are never more than 35 characters.
Then, resigned, I downgraded Tze Xien to the shameful position of middle name. 

It turned out that this prolonged, self-indulgent internal struggle was all in vain.

Some time before starting the school year, I received the following email from a university administrator: 

Oh. My. America. Of the 14,000,605 bureaucratic dystopian futures I looked into, I somehow missed the one where someone thought Kwee Tze Xien was my last name.

But fear not - I had long been trained for this scenario.

As a master of non-confrontational & indirect communication styles (to the detriment of my dating life), I "patiently" sent the following reply:

Excerpt of said attachment:

I received this reply:

Phew! 

Achievement Unlocked: I finally had a name in American format! 

Of course, as an American Jedi in training, I soon learned to conceal my first name of Tze Xien Rebecca and adopt a Middle Name or Middle Initial at critical points in time. For example, in resumes and networking events, where Rebecca T. Kwee was more likely to be reviewed and pronounced correctly by recruiters and strangers.

But that's another story, another lesson. For now, I was one step closer to American Mastery.