Growing up in Singapore, I was indifferent to being a Tan. "Tan" is like "Smith" in Singapore - you can't swing a purse without knocking over six of us. 9.5% of Singapore's population shares my last name. Statistically speaking, this means that I could conceivably walk into a party of 50 people in Singapore, and meet 5 other Tans. That is some crazy shit.
But for all it's foibles, being a Tan in Singapore was easy. No one misspelled my name. No one inclined their heads at a 45 degree angle, and told me spell it out, s-l-o-w-l-y, one letter at a time. Being a Tan was easy, identifiable, vanilla. School officials and government clerks would scan my face in a bored, purely perfunctory fashion, before checking off the "Chinese" box on forms. I felt sorry for the East Indian kids with long names like "Shankaranarayanan." The Chinese kids would tease them mercilessly by saying their first names out loud, then replacing last names with a series of ugly, nonsensical gurgles. Not me though. Never me. Being a Tan afforded the comfort and arrogance with never having to prove yourself to the status quo, because you were the status quo.
Then, we moved to California, and my name became a point of interest. Wonder of wonders, for the first time ever, people were actually misspelling my name. I never thought it was possible for three letters to have these many permutations. "Ten". "Tam". "Tang." Some immigrants recount tales of their first American grocery store shopping trip, or the first time they caught sight of sprawling, interconnected highways. My own immigrant experience is distilled in this sing song exchange, repeated ad nauseum "T as in Tom A as in Apple N as in Nancy no not M N as in Nancy yes my last name is Tan with an n." In that naively enthusiastic, guileless, uniquely American way, people would attempt to place me in their world order by saying, "Tan...is that....?"
"Chinese." I would finish for them.
Ah! A smile of relief. All was good in the world. I was figured out. Sometimes a little joke would follow, "That makes you a California Tan!"
Indeed. In the years that would follow, this California Tan started attending college. At house parties and keggers, when the beer was flowing and everyone was swaying gently to Sublime, I'd have my signature socio-political rants with fellow nerds, and declaim things like global warming, the gradual erosion of our civil rights, and the horribly archaic practice of changing one's name when one got married. "It's pathetic," I remember saying. "It's like giving your family background the finger. Does your heritage not count anymore?" The logic was infallible, I felt. If men could segue in and out of the cycles of life without any changes in their name, it stood to reason that women should enjoy that same privilege as well. Later on, as a newbie marketer in corporate America, I watched women around me get married. Half of them kept their last names, citing "their identity" and "professional reasons." I cheered them on silently. If the personal was political, I too was determined to never embody this sexist tradition.
I don't know when I changed my mind. I only know for a fact that it was after I met him. It could have been on one of our long walks up West Avenue, when he'd walk me back to my apartment from a date. Or, it could have been when we were at a party, the two of us laughing at an inside joke to which no one else was privy. Perhaps it happened when we first moved in together, on a lazy Sunday morning, over spinach omelets and the Miami Herald. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to look at myself as part of whole, and not a separate unit. Was I was losing my identity? No. On the contrary, I was with someone who inspired me to be a better version of myself. Sort of like an enhanced, debugged, Bev Ver 2.0. Sharing a name with him stood for partnership and solidarity, not subjugation and sexism. And the most profound symbolism of all - that no matter what differences we may have, no matter difficulties life throws our way - we weather these storms as a team.
I still have three more months of being a Tan. These days, I have come to look upon my name as an old friend, one whose company I sometimes took for granted. We grew up together, discovered the world together, questioned god, the meaning of life, and everything in between. Who I am, what I've seen and done - my old friend has been there for it all, since the beginning, since Day One. I don't give up old friends easily. Thankfully, I won't have to. Tan will still be a part of me. A middle-name, and therefore one that is not front and center. Still, a part of me. No final goodbyes, this one's too hard. More importantly, I'll be saying hello to my new name. Murray. Old Irish in origin, it makes me want to skip and dance. It sounds jolly, like a whole bunch of people laughing out loud, like someone you would have multiple pints and crack dirty jokes with. In the history of his family at least, I'll be the first Chinese Murray. I like seeing our names side-by-side, two worlds coming together. Part of a whole. The same team. One family. I like that.
