Mark Batty Publisher

Please Call Me Boss

February 27, 2009

The globe is reeling from the tailspin of its financial markets. What began with bright young things cooking up financial mechanisms for a fictive economy has crept into the real one. Container ships are sitting empty in shipping hubs the world over, and unloaded cargo is cluttering warehouses at the harbor. With the unsold products—everything from Mercedes to computer products—piling up, global manufacturing has faltered, and the loss of jobs and spending that this entails will reflect back into the economy, exacerbating an already deteriorating situation.

No surprise then that heads of state are scrambling to cobble together a response that is cohesive—and will keep them in office. And this will mean balancing the anger of constituents at their loss of livelihoods with the fear of foreign investors about further loss of wealth. Because, like it or not, globalization has linked people the world over via the interests of business, and jobs in Detroit or Beloit no longer have the US as their center of gravity. Profit went international, and it took with it the viability of entire economic sectors.

The globalization of business interests has brought cultures previously separated by barriers of trade, land and sea into frequent, if not constant, contact. The effects of this are far deeper than merely economic: they represent an exchange of practices and customs, not only of money, and in the process they create novel forms of familiar traditions. This exchange is a two way street. So there is Hollywood’s appropriation of Bollywood’s styles and tropes in “Slumdog Millionaire,” but there is also Istanbul’s taking up of Los Angeles noir in Istanbul Noir. Or there is the proliferation of Hollywood films the world over, as exemplified in MBP’s Translating Hollywood, while there is the ascendance of Chinese artists in the art centers of Europe and America.

The result of one such interchange is the practice, in China, for people to adopt Western names—curious, maybe, for people first coming across it, but completely sensible to anyone aware of the situation. As a result of increased trade with the rest of the world, people who come into contact with tourists or foreign businessmen take on names that their new business partners, friends or clients can easily pronounce. Initially done for practical reasons, the practice has grown to the extent that it has a life of its own: English names now have, for many Chinese people, an appeal in and of themselves.

Valerie Blanco and Ellen Feberwee’s new book, In China, My Name Is…, presents a snapshot of this phenomenon. In 2007, the authors traveled through Shanghai and asked people if they had an English name. The names they were told range from wholly incongruous like “Rubberpixy” and oddly sweet like “Apple.” Other people were only too happy to vent, in half-irritated grumblings, about how the idea of adopting an English name is unnecessary or worse. Each response is paired with the person’s reasons for choosing his or her name, and set next to the respondent’s portrait. “Seven” claims to have chosen his name because he likes dancing; “Ricky” is an admitted fan of Ricky Martin; “Boss” likes to be called Boss by his boss. The variety of names and the reasons they were chosen present a sketch of China’s relationship both to the West and to naming in general — one of the many unexpected results of globalization.

–JCD

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