I am NOT a PRC for crying out aloud!

Good grief. OK this is what I hate about fame that I do not seek. Since getting caught up in the Alvinology & NS saga about his blog referring to NS as "modern day slavery", people have been googling me (crikey, don't get me started) - and if you wanna come to read my blog, welcome and have a good read please. But people have been jumping to all kinds of conclusions about me and making wrongful assumptions - I would like to clear one up once and for all please. People have been assuming that I am from China because of the way my surname is spelt: "Liang".

That is me at Liang Court back in August 2013

I am not a PRC, ie. I was not born in China, nor were my parents. I was born in Kadang Kerbau hospital in Singapore in 1976. My mother was born in Singapore during WW2 and my father was born in the state of Johor in what was then British Malaya and he had a really tough start to life, having to survive the entire Japanese occupation of British Malaya. My father moved to Singapore as a student and where he met my mother and they got married.

So if you met me today and asked me where I was from, I would say, "My dad's from Malaysia, my mum's from Singapore and I was born in Singapore - but I am British by nationality." Or the short answer to that same question would be, "Singapore." So people would be wondering, why do I have a hanyupinyin surname? Why isn't it Leong/Leung or Neo/Nio but Liang? "Liang" would indicate that the person was born in China.

Should it matter how my surname is spelt?

Well it's a simple enough question to answer - my dad was born as a Leong. All his family have the surname Leong as they are Hakka and that's the way I presume they say it in Hakka (sorry, I speak Hokkien fluently but don't speak any Hakka). My dad hated the name his parents gave him anyway so when he naturalized as a Singaporean citizen, he took the opportunity to change his name. Now to cut a long story short, he had fallen out with his parents big time over his choice to marry my mother - his parents hated my mother with a passion because she is Hokkien and they really wanted him to marry a nice Hakka girl, then return to the village in Johor. So when my father married a nice Hokkien girl and wanted to stay on in Singapore, well, all hell broke lose (and that's putting it mildly already).

I'm on my dad's side for this, I think my late grandparents' anti-Hokkien racism is fucking ridiculous. And just to rub salt in the wound, I am fluent in Hokkien (amongst other languages) but don't speak Hakka and have no intention to ever learn it. I would much rather spend my time and energy studying a language like Korean or Japanese instead.

Do you speak Mandarin and your parents' dialect as well?

So in a bid to spite his parents, he changed his surname as well. For his parents, it was a bloody big deal to carry on the family name so he changed his surname to Liang. Now you may think, Liang - Leong, it's still the same Chinese character 梁 so what's the big deal? He only changed two letters in a surname that is just five letters long. It's not like he changed it to Muthusamy, Robertson or Yamawaki. You see, my dad's parents don't speak a word of Mandarin - they're of that generation in Malaysia where they just do not feel the need to speak any Mandarin. They spoke Hakka as a first language and were also fluent in Malay and Cantonese - but they had no knowledge of Mandarin or Hokkien because it was just not spoken where they live. So for them, Liang may as well have been Muthusamy, Robertson or Yamawaki as it did sound that different from what they were used to. But it was just the gesture of changing his surname that achieved the effect of pissing them off royally, the actual spelling of it was irrelevant.

I guess it's a big deal for them in those days to reject the very identity your parents gave you - by changing your name altogether to say, "no this is not whom I am, this is a clean break from the past, I will not be whom you want me to be." I suppose that gesture has lost its potency in recent years, I remember having a classmate who chose a different Christian name every year as he couldn't decide if he wanted to be a Christopher, Joseph, Terry, Andrew or Brian. And Singaporean-Chinese people picking a Christian name has become standard practice these days anyway (whether it was given to you at birth by your parents or picked by the individual later on in life). Times have changed - parents are far more happy for children to do things like that these days.

Do you know who you want to be?

Don't forget, for my late grandparents, it was a bloody big deal for my dad's children to carry on the family name (a concept I found rather alien to say the least). So my dad was determined that if he had a son, that son (ie. yours truly, Limpeh) would not have the surname Leong but something else.  I just don't get it - you want to leave a legacy after you die, do it in a way that will have you properly remember. Singaporean gymnast Terry Tay has just had a new skill named after him on the rings and the next time any other gymnast anywhere in the world does that same skill, they will utter his name. That's how you should immortalize yourself and leave your mark on earth, rather than have children inherit your surname. Boy, if there was ever a generation gap... My grandparents' values are totally alien to me, they just make absolutely no sense to me at all in this modern day and age.

So there you go, that is the story as to why I have a Hanyupinyin surname. I was born in Singapore to a Malaysian-Hakka father and a Singaporean-Hokkien mother and somehow, I am Eurasian as well (see the DNA analysis here). That's why I have a big nose that's so not Chinese. Like how many Chinese people have big noses? I hope that clears this up once and for all. Limpeh is from Ang Mo Kio okay, not China. Thank you, kum siah!

Yes I have very Chinese eyes but a rather large nose...