I have a question about the ...

• Feb 2, 2006 03:00 AM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Ziyi Zhang

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 said, action star Chow Yun-Fat kept his name ordered traditionally and I don’t think it’s done him any harm in Western markets (the hyphen in Yun-Fat is only used sometimes — I’ve never been able to figure out the convention). But director John Woo, with whom Chow made five hugely popular films — A Better Tomorrow (1986), A Better Tomorrow II (1987), The Killer (1990), Once a Thief (1991) and Hard-Boiled (1992) — not only uses the Western order but has a Western first name, as do Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, both of whom have made significant inroads into Western markets. Sometimes they take decidedly offbeat first names: Witness director Fruit Chan.

Traditionally, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese names are also rendered surname first, though Japanese people doing business with Westerners generally turn their names around. Thai names are usually rendered surname last, assuming that the person has a surname; not all do, because surnames in Thailand are a 20th-century development.