> At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because sh

> At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends. Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite. She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since. As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.