Most Asian people would give themselves an English name, especially people from China, Taiwan, and Korea... If you are an English native speaker, then you might wonder why people use an English name to call themselves instead of using their original name? And some people's name might be very strange especially in English native speaker's eye! Are they really dislike their name? Or even feel ashamed for their name?
As a Taiwanese, I know some Taiwanese name might really difficult to pronounce for those who are not able to speak Chinese fluently. Especially we have 5 tones in Chinese, but for those English native speakers, they don't know how to pronounce correctly even if we pronounce in English. That's one of the reasons why we Taiwanese people would like to give ourselves an English name to instead, because English has only two tones and it sounds flat. However, I disagree with some people say we suppose to proud of our name and we shouldn't have an English name! Seriously, having an English name doesn't mean we don't proud of our name!
I will take an example of myself, my name suppose to be Gan, yu-ting (First name and last name) in Chinese, but in English, it will be Timothy Yuting Gan (Last name, middle name and first name). I have my English name since I was 4 or 5, even though I really forgot who gave me the name, I didn't change it for any reasons. Now, my English name became a formal name to me, and it shows on my passport and visa card. After I grew up, I found out it's a name from Bible. For me, I am really proud of my name, and I am willing to share the stories' with others.
Here is a following link of the explanation for my name below,
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Timothy+1
If you ask me why most Asian people have an English name, I cannot give you a proper answer. However, there is an interesting thing I'd like to share you. In Chinese, every character has their own meaning, even sometimes one character has multi-meanings, so it's really hard to tell when you see the same pinyin in English. They look the same in English, but actually words in Chinese are totally different! For example, my name Yu-ting, it's a really common name in Chinese, especially most girl's name are Yu-ting. It's kind of embarrassing, but the characters are totally different. My name yu-ting (聿廷), the word "聿(Yu)" is actually a word from an ancient officer's pen in court, and the word 廷(ting) means palace. In other words, my name yu-ting (聿廷) is a wish that I would become a person who works in the court in the future, or even represent me as a person who is a scholar. But for those some girl's name which also pronounce yu-ting, but in Chinese it may looks like 玉婷, the word 玉(Yu) means a jade, and 婷 means a beautiful girl with a good temperament. See the differences? We have same pronunciation but totally different meaning. If you do research about the culture in Chinese, then you will find out most of our name related to family, good wishes, a future, or a personality.
For more English name information, you can follow to the link below,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7R41LB9FF0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGnw5EePA4
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