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Heeey, what's up. It's only 10 a.m. over here and I feel so cranky already! I am mostly cheering myself up by thinking about how awesome Asada Mao is. She competed at the 2008 Worlds without a coach, you guys. And then she won! Is that not amazing! She is pretty awesome.

Additional pet peeve:

-- I dislike it when people refer to East Asian skaters by "given name, family name". That is not how it goes! I always twitch when I see mentions of "Yu-Na Kim", although weirdly enough I always catch myself calling Mao "Mao Asada" in my head. This is when I >:( at myself again.

But here are some things that makes me happy:

-- Mao is the South Koreans' favourite Japanese celebrity. Yu-Na is the Japanese' favourite Korean celebrity. :D!

-- They are BFFs. THERE CAN BE NO HATESEX WITH THEM. EVER. (Um, that came out a little cranky.)

-- Mao's pretty.

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And she triple axels like a BAMF! Mao &hearts

:D I think it is completely indicative of where my thoughts are rn that I didn't even THINK about that! But yeah, seriously. Three triple axels! Good lord *_______________*

&HER;

I had the same name order problem during the 2008 Summer Olympics with Cseh László. Then again, I was mostly happy that the poor guy got any media attention at all, considering it was the summer of Michael Phelps. :\

Edited 2010-05-29 02:54 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't know that Hungary used Eastern name order! This is interesting to know, and also four-time medallist? That's impressive.

I probably should cut them slack since it's not as well known that Hungarians use that name order, but I still got a little indignant over it. Anyway, He's pretty awesome! He set all sorts of European records that summer and any other year, he would have been a big story! &László;

That is AMAZING! *shakes fist at Phelps*

Still, though. They could have done a little research! On further Wikipedia-browsing apparently Japanese name-order is a little fraught -- it's traditionally family name-given name, but it's become incredibly common practice (more so than for Chinese or Korean names) to use given-family in the media.

Ethnocentrism. :/

For whatever reason I don't jump to the family-given thing with Japanese people? Mostly because Japanese people tend to have longer names (this is just from my experiences with my own family). I usually try to figure out what the person prefers. Like, I would always try to refer to Yu-na as Kim Yu-na (and I write it Yu-na because that is how her name ended up getting romanized).

According to Wikipedia, which fits in with what I know about Japanese names (I took Japanese for three years in high school) -- However, English publications tend to prefer the Western order when discussing contemporary individuals, especially politicians, businessmen and athletes. There is no reason to do so except that the Japanese used to choose to write their names in the Western order in Western language in the past, thinking that it was the correct way. English publication merely followed this tradition. It should be noted that there is a tendency to respect foreign customs, including the preservation of original pronunciations of foreign names in Japanese. Adopting the Western order could have been the reverse of this respect. In contrast, when written in kanji characters, the order of Japanese names is never reversed.

So, long history! Figuring out what the person prefers is a really good way of doing that too. :)

I dislike it when people refer to East Asian skaters by "given name, family name".

YES. and this goes for every sports broadcaster ever >:(

awwww, they're so pretty together! I love inter-country rivals who are actually best buddies.

It's Kim Yu-Na! KIM YU-NA! ... I posted when I was feeling all cranky in the morning, and now I am feeling a lot more zen, but the point still stands.

They are so lovely! ♥ They went out shopping together, ps.

Yu-Na/Mao is ♥

I agree about the names, also it's Yu-Na, not Yuna!

Hmm -- I'm not sure about rejecting 'Yuna'. I used to write that because her name is pronounced 'Yeon-a' in Korean, and was supposed to be spelt that way, only it got rendered incorrectly when she was applying for her visa? For that reason 'Yu-Na' makes me uneasy because it splits the syllables very clearly at an incorrect place, whereas 'Yuna' doesn't rule out the proper pronunciation completely.

BUT I JUST KEEP SEEING 'Yu-Na' AROUND. And I am a conformist! /o\

Oh, that is interesting! I didn't know that. In that case, I think it depends on which version she personally uses. I mean, it may have been rendered incorrectly, but you can still pronounce it right. For example, my name is Катя, the English spelling which is closest to the way I pronounce is is Katya and yet I spell it Katia and then tell people how to say it correctly.

Yeah, going with that too!

Also, that (wrt your name) is good to know. I'll be adjusting my brainvoice when pronouncing your name, then! :)

Stop feeling cranky! I'm reading Johnny/Stephane fics, what more do you want?

Asada Mao (look, I'm learning!) does seem pretty damn awesome.

:D! I hope you enjoy them! STEPHANE. *_____________*

I am learning too! \o/ WITHOUT A COACH OMG. Also, triple axels. ♥

when i was watching the olympics, they made a point of saying that since she had been training in North America she preferred to go by given name, surname and so that's why they were calling her that. So it could be her choice?

Oh, I see! Thanks for telling me. :)

She competed at the 2008 Worlds without a coach, you guys.
DAMN, GIRL. And she is indeed gorgeous.

although weirdly enough I always catch myself calling Mao "Mao Asada" in my head.
I do that too, while I'm on board with 'Kim Yu-Na'. Maybe our brains uses the 'shorter name first' sorting method?

Right? SO PRETTY OMG. *_______________*

Hm --

kyasuriin has pointed out that it may be her choice. Like I said to

alex_boylove on chat, I'm not convinced by the 'shorter name first' thing; we don't see anything weird about Western names like Amanda Brown! So it may indeed be down to what we see the most often in print or whatever -- Yu-Na does get referred to as 'Kim Yu-Na' most frequently, after all.

It's interesting, I did a lot of thinking about the name order issue, as I'm Chinese-American and did a lot of East Asian history stuff, and for skaters I consciously decided to just standardize within my writing for the fandom of given name first, then family name. In large part this is because I am writing in American English and that's what the American media does (though if a particular skater specifically expresses a preference of how they are referred to in English-language media, I will likely conform to that -- for a purely spelling-related example, I've started to spell Plushenko's given name Evgeni in my head, whereas before he had a twitter I wasn't really sure b/c NBC spelled it differently and other online sources used a third spelling as well... actually it occurs to me that Yuna Kim's twitter has her name as "Yuna Kim," so perhaps I should take out the hyphen), and I think there's something to be said for the clarity and pattern of it.

The odd part is that within East Asian academic scholarship, I was very very intent on keeping the name order right. But I think that it's sort of... contextual. I have made my peace with standardization based on language for fic.

I have a feeling that if I were ever to write fic in Chinese, I would use the Chinese name order for anyone whose name is expressed in characters, and would try to cobble together the kind of names Chinese teachers give Westerners when they study Chinese for people who usually use Roman letters.

Still, I can see why it bothers you. I'm not sure why it doesn't bother me in the same way... maybe I'm just used to having my given name first for American documents and family name first for Chinese ones, I guess.

Yeah, that's the thing -- I'm not used to it at all (context: I'm Chinese Singaporean), and doing 'given-family' for East Asian skaters -- though perhaps not for Japanese skaters -- just seems unbearably odd, and has the added bonus of making me feel weirdly defensive about it. I assume (with the added caveat that I may be wrong) that Yuna, having spent the larger part of her life in Korea, would be most accustomed to thinking of herself as 'Kim Yuna' instead. Like I said, it's different for the Japanese -- they seem to be more used to the given-family order, and as

kyasuriin pointed out, may actually prefer that.

Given that it's fic we're talking about, if (say) Yuna were the pov character, having her refer to herself as 'Yuna Kim' would be pretty jarring for me.

*nod* I can see how that might be a good general rule of thumb (it would be a nice, relatively subtle pov marker), though if we're talking about Yuna specifically, she's spent a fair amount of time in Canada by now, so I could also see her having gotten at least somewhat used to given-family, especially as it's listed that way in her twitter profile, as well as on her official website and youtube channel. She does seem to write in Korean a lot on her twitter, though.

I don't know. I think I'm just going to have to re-evaluate every time I write a fic including East Asian skater (and skaters from other family-name first countries), and take into consideration the specific pov the fic is in, the skater's own history and whether or not there seems to be a personal preference indicated in their English-language communications, and the general context of the fic.

It's good to be mindful, I think! For my own part, I am less convinced of 'Kim Yuna' than when I started out, so. I think that I'd really like to see fic that -- well, not tackling that exactly -- but fic that takes that into account. It's pretty telling of the cultural shift that Yuna's gone through. If I'm not wrong she's attending university in Korea still! I wonder how many months in the year she actually spends in Canada.

Oh, that fic could be amazing. I believe you're right about the Korean university. I guess it might depend on how intensely she's planning on competing in coming years, and as far as I know she hasn't decided that yet. So much up in the air!

I'm really glad we had this discussion -- I'll definitely keep thinking about these issues! :)

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