(no subject)

[extemporally]

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.

Comments

[athenejen]

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.

[extemporally.livejournal.com]

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.

[athenejen]

*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.

[extemporally.livejournal.com]

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.

[athenejen]

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! :)