“Do you know what’s the most popular last name in the world?” my dad would ask me for the umpteenth time as a child. “Lee!”
I was never sure if that was actually true. But it sounds plausible. There’s Bruce Lee of course. There are also plenty of famous Black (Spike) and white (Robert E., Tommy, Stan) people with the surname.
Unfortunately, I eventually discovered that my last name carried its own set of problems.
I was a reporter at the Star Tribune for nearly six years before leaving for a new job. In my place, the newspaper hired a cheerful Californian pal named Wendy Lee.
Aside from our last names, Chinese descent, and mutual affection for karaoke, we are completely different people. She’s short. I’m tallish. She’s West Coast. I’m East. She’s not afraid to drive a car. Uber would go bankrupt without me.
Yet people can’t help but fixate on our last name. Are we married? Are we related? Are we actually the same person?
The answer to all of these questions is a resounding no. Though I figure we’re related in the same way everyone is related to Australopithecus africanus.
Up until this point, my number one problem was people who mistook me for the other Asian guy in the newsroom. But now Wendy Lee just added a whole new wrinkle to the game.
The day the paper announced her hire, a friend told me: “No one had anything better to say so we just focused on your last name.”
Really? What’s so unusual about it? If Wendy Smith just replaced Thomas Smith at the Star Tribune, would anybody have noticed the similarity?
It didn’t help that a headline in a local news blog read: “Strib completes Lee for Lee swap.” I suddenly felt like a baseball card.
One day, reporters gathered in a conference room for a tense staff meeting. After a few heated exchanges, the room grew quiet. My friend, never wanting to waste a perfectly good awkward moment, raised his hand.
“I want to ask a question that I think everyone here wants to ask,” he deadpanned. “Is Tom Lee related to Wendy Lee?”
Aside from a few muffled giggles, no one really understood the joke, including the editor running the meeting.
“Um … I don’t think so,” the editor dutifully answered. “I do know that they know each other quite well.”
After a while, people grew bored with the last name thing. So they started to focus on our looks.
“You know, Wendy Lee is much cuter than you Tom,” I heard more than once.
Now, I completely agree that Wendy is much cuter than me. In fact, I would feel downright uncomfortable if people said I was much cuter than Wendy.
But why would the question even come up? Do we always like to compare the attractiveness of present and previous employees?
If the paper announced Wendy Smith is replacing Tom Smith, do people automatically think: I wonder if she’s cuter than him?
Now imagine if I was female. Successive Asian American female reporters who share the same last name but are not related?
People’s heads would just explode.
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China’s population is about 1.4 billion and Japan’s is less than 10% of that. Yet, it is reported that China has only about 7,000 family names, while Japan has roughly 300,000 family names which were mostly created at the time of the Meiji Reformation in 1868. Before that time, only the Samurai class and village chieftains were allowed to have family names. In order to govern the country, the new Japanese government required everybody should have a family name and people picked up whatever the names available or created their own.
According to the China census, Lee and Wong are alternating number 1 and 2 largest blood clans of all of China, plus roughly 70 to 75% of all Asians in the lesser Asian nations i.e. Viet Nam, Cambodia, Thailand, etc., are ethnically Chinese. Those of us who are Lee and Han are over 20% of the world’s population. Unlike the non-Chinese Lees, who can be black, white, or whatever, if the Chinese Lees share the same calligraphy, regardless of how Lee is spelled in English, they are blood-related, making them indeed the most common last name in the world.