Question: I have a question about the beautiful actress Zhang Ziyi, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But in Memoirs of a Geisha, she was called Ziyi Zhang. What gives, and what’s her first name?
Answer: Zhang Ziyi’s first name is Ziyi, but in many Asian cultures it’s traditional to give the surname first. Given that for the bulk of human history, the most important thing you could know about a person — in both the East and the West — was who his or her family was, I’m surprised that this order isn’t the norm everywhere. But in the West, the standard name format is surname last (generally a patronymic — the father’s name) and given name first. Miss Zhang appears to have adopted the Western order as part of her bid for international stardom; Americans especially have a problem with “weird” names. That
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