Taiwanese Childhood English Names: Mary, Kevin, and the Naming Authority of Cram-School Teachers

30-second overview: In 1983, Hess opened its first branch. Over the next three years, Kid Castle, Giraffe, and Sesame Street English, three chain children’s English schools, were established one after another. In 1987, Sesame Street English in Taipei proclaimed: “NO CHINESE, ENGLISH PLEASE.” From that moment on, children in Taiwan began receiving, on their first day in the classroom, an English name from a teacher’s mouth that they had never chosen themselves: Mary, John, Kevin, Peter, most often drawn from Longman textbooks and the character lists in cram-school materials. An academic paper on this “assigned-name generation” (Barešová & Pikhart 2020, N=76) says most people received their first English name from their first English teacher. After they grew up, that name would continue to be interrogated across passport romanization, multinational-company Outlook accounts, Starbucks cups, and airport customs, until one day someone at customs in California asks you: “So your name is Chia-hao, not Kevin?”

In 2024, under the amended Name Act, Kolas Yotaka became the first person in Taiwan whose national ID card had fully removed Chinese characters and retained only an Indigenous name¹. In an interview with the China Times, she once mentioned something about her name: “Yotaka is my father’s Japanese name,” the night hawk, きよたか, the sound registered in the household records during the kōminka imperialization period². A line runs from her father’s Japanese name to her Indigenous name; in between lies a whole history of Taiwanese people having their names written by others. When she thought of this name finally coming home, she might have seen, at the corner children’s English school, another group of five-year-olds just receiving Olivia, Aiden, and Mason from their teacher. The act of assigned naming was never abolished; only the person handing out names changed.

“Mary, John, A-Tao”: The 30 Seconds When the Teacher Looked at the List

Almost every Taiwanese person born in the 1980s or 1990s has seen this scene.

On the first day of class, the English teacher stood at the front, looked at the attendance sheet, let their eyes move from one name to the next (Zhang San, Li Si, A-Tao, A-Hsun), then looked up and announced everyone’s English name. No one raised a hand to ask. No one said, “I already have one.” Chris Wang described this moment in a 2017 Medium essay: “Their English names were very likely assigned because everyone in class needed to have an English name, so the English teacher named them off the cuff in the manner of ‘Zhang San is John, Li Si is Tom, A-Tao is Mary,’ and some people really did use that name for the rest of their lives.”³

Not everyone got Mary.

A 2019 recollection on PTT’s StupidClown board records that the author, kriss, was sent to Sesame Street English in fourth grade. He wrote that when the English teacher looked at the list and gave students names, “their hand shook, and after a 30-second pause,” they called him Romeo. The reason was that he weighed 74 kilograms at the time⁴. Romeo followed him through all of elementary school. Later, in junior high, he changed it himself to Kriss.

📝 Curator’s Note
Those 30 seconds were the first moment when naming authority was handed over. The teacher was not hesitating over whether to name the child, but over which name to give, and all 30 pairs of eyes in the classroom agreed: go ahead. From the day parents sent a child into a children’s English class, ownership of the act of naming had in fact already changed hands. In Chris Wang’s “off the cuff,” there is an unasked question: who allowed the teacher to name people this way? The answer is that everyone allowed it, including the child.

The most complete academic paper to date on English-name practices among Taiwanese youth is “Going by an English Name,” published by Barešová and Pikhart in MDPI Social Sciences in 2020, with a sample of 76 Taiwanese young people aged 18 to 41 (61 women and 15 men)⁵. The paper states directly: “the majority received their first English name from their first teacher of English at an educational institution”; most respondents’ first English name came from their first English teacher⁵. The paper also records an age-cohort detail: among respondents under 30, most received their name between ages 8 and 11; among those 31 and older, most received it between ages 12 and 13. Children’s English classes pushed the threshold for “getting an English name” earlier generation by generation.

NO CHINESE, ENGLISH PLEASE: Four Children’s English Chains That Erupted Within Three Years

Behind the scene of the teacher looking at the list was infrastructure built by four cram schools.

Hess was established in 1983 by Karen Hess herself and her husband Joseph Chu⁶. In 1987, the group expanded to form a research and development team of local and foreign teachers; in 1990, it opened the first Hess Bookstore. Kid Castle was founded in 1986 and launched its first in-house children’s English materials, Chevady’s World, in 1988⁷. Giraffe English also began in 1986, opened its first “children and youth English teaching center” in 1987, and put English programs on TTV and CTS in 1989⁸. Sesame Street English established its Taiwan headquarters in 1987 as an imported licensed brand. A 2025 CommonWealth Magazine interview recorded the slogan it proclaimed that year: “NO CHINESE, ENGLISH PLEASE”; by 2025, it had accumulated 103 branches and 500,000 students⁹.

Here is one time point that is often misremembered: Sesame Street English landing in Taiwan in 1987 does not mean Sesame Workshop personally designed the materials. Sesame Workshop’s global Sesame English ESL line was not launched until 1999. From 1987 to 1999 in Taiwan, what operated was a licensed brand plus locally compiled materials produced by a Taiwan-based team¹⁰. The memory that “Big Bird taught me English in childhood” is real; the memory that “the American headquarters was designing your materials in 1987” is retrofitted.

⚠️ Common Misremembering
The claim “I grew up using materials designed by Sesame Workshop’s U.S. headquarters” is almost certainly untrue. Between 1987 and 1999, Sesame Street English in Taiwan ran on a hybrid mechanism of licensed branding plus locally compiled materials. Sesame Workshop’s global Sesame English ESL line did not launch its first ESL materials until 1999. The Big Bird posters were real; the textbook content was not.

The eruption of four children’s English chains within three years coincided with the lifting of martial law in 1987, the opening of family visits to China, and the wider use of passports. The state had just opened the gate to overseas travel, and civil society began preparing a “name for crossing out” for its children first. This civil action moved faster than the public sector; at the time, the official standard for “how Chinese names should become Roman letters” in passport fields would not settle for another 15 years.

Textbook Character Lists as SSOT: Peter and Mary in Longman Textbooks

If an entire generation’s English names came from teachers, where did the teachers’ names come from?

The answer is not any one book called A Complete Collection of English Names. Researchers of this topic will find that in 1988 there was no such book with a named ISBN; the closest is the 1992 English Name Treasury¹¹. The real SSOT for naming was the characters in the teaching materials.

On Hong Kong’s Baby Kingdom forum, one parent recalled the English books they used as children: “the characters in the Longman English books: Tom, Mary, Peter, Betty”¹². Taiwan’s Plurk has the same clue: “I was one of the Peter/Mary, Tom/Sally crowd”¹³. The same Longman English materials swept through the children’s English markets of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, implanting the same four or five names (Peter, Mary, Tom, Sally, Betty) into the memories of two generations. Whether the teacher actually flipped through the book was not the point; the list in the teacher’s head had already been given by the textbook.

There is a detail in Barešová and Pikhart’s paper worth reading twice: among the 76 Taiwanese young people they surveyed, names included Angela, Elena, Claire, Cindy, Michelle, Tina, Eason, Jack, James, Jessica, Nicole, Grace, and Heidi, and 70.6% were traditional names in the SSA (U.S. Social Security Administration) top 1000⁵. In other words, the default list used by cram schools and textbooks was essentially a packaged transfer of the most common names among American babies into Taiwanese classrooms. The Mary received by children in Taiwan was Mary, the No. 1 name for American newborns in the 1950s.

This 70.6% is evidence of a map. Taiwan’s children’s English classes did not grow their own naming logic; they took up the tail end of American middle-class naming logic. At the time, teachers had a very concrete reference in mind for “what an English name should look like”: what was written in the textbook, what older students had used, what they themselves had been taught by their teachers when they were students. Where this line begins cannot be solved, because it was constantly copying itself.

💡 Did You Know
Longman, the publishing brand, began in the precincts of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1724 and is now nearly 300 years old. Tom and Mary were defaults of an English textbook industry accumulated by the British Empire’s language publishing from the 18th century, then fitted at the end of the 20th century into standardized children’s English teaching packages and sold across the global Sinophone world. The generation named across Hong Kong and Taiwan was, in effect, named by a British publisher.

A Passport Will Not Say Kevin Lin: How Three Romanization Systems Divided One Sheet of Paper

The naming history of the children’s English classroom is civil; the naming history of the passport field is national.

Open Article 14, Subparagraph 2 of the Enforcement Rules of the Passport Act. The Chinese text is very clear: “When an applicant applies for a passport for the first time and does not have a foreign-language name, the Chinese name shall be transliterated character by character into Latin letters according to the pronunciation of the national languages”¹⁴. Note the key term: “national languages,” not “English name.” From the start, the legal design blocked a combination such as Kevin Lin, an “English name + romanized Chinese surname,” from being printed directly in the passport. The official name field in the passport wants the Roman-letter transliteration of the Chinese name, not a separately chosen English name.

Beyond pronunciation, how to spell it introduces a second layer of choice. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ romanization table lists four systems side by side: Wade-Giles, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu Pinyin, which people may choose freely¹⁵. “Choose freely” was the Ministry’s phrasing in 2016 when it responded to a Liberty Times letter titled “Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Please Don’t Turn Us into ‘Chinese People.’” The letter criticized the Ministry for putting Hanyu Pinyin first in the table; the Ministry answered that “the order has no special significance”¹⁶. But every time the government changes hands, the ordering of this table gets inspected again.

On August 22, 2002, the Chen Shui-bian government sent Tongyong Pinyin to the Executive Yuan for filing as the standard for romanizing place and personal names¹⁷. On September 16, 2008, the Ma Ying-jeou government announced the adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, effective January 1, 2009¹⁸. On August 9, 2019, the Tsai Ing-wen government, through MOFA order Wai-Shou-Ling-Yi No. 1086603416, amended the “Mandarin pronunciation” in Article 14, Subparagraph 2 to “national-language pronunciation,” giving the romanization of Tâi-gí, Hakka, and Indigenous languages equal standing with “Mandarin” romanization¹⁹. Three waves of amendment, three sets of political symbols layered onto the same passport.

Misalignment also occurs not only between governments but within families. Article 14, Subparagraph 5, Item 2 of the rules specifically names one reason for change: where “the romanized foreign-language surname differs in spelling from that of a lineal blood relative or sibling,” an application for change may be filed²⁰. The existence of this legal clause itself acknowledges a structural phenomenon: in the same family, because parents and children obtained passports under different governments’ romanization standards, surnames may be written in several versions. A legal back door was opened for this kind of misalignment.

📊 How Three Romanization Systems Spell the Same Surname

Surname	Wade-Giles	Tongyong Pinyin	Hanyu Pinyin
陳	Chen	Chen	Chen
蔡	Tsai	Cai	Cai
周	Chou	Jhou	Zhou
邱	Chiu	Ciou	Qiu
謝	Hsieh	Sie	Xie

The same surname can be spelled in sharply different ways under romanization systems designated by different governments. Across four generations in one family, grandparents may use Wade-Giles, parents Tongyong, and you Hanyu Pinyin; no one is wrong, but the government changed three times.

Taiwan Panorama once organized street-level scenes: on the two sides of Guangfu South Road, the two characters “光復” on the road signs were translated as Kwangfu on one side and Guangfu on the other; on Section 4 of Zhongxiao East Road, Zhongxiao was translated as Chunghsiao, and by Section 5 it had become ZhongSiao²¹. If even road signs cannot match, what chance does a family have?

“So Your Name Is Chia-hao, Not Kevin?”: The Identity Reconciliation Statement of Adulthood

A childhood English name has only one identity question: what are you called? An adult English name has five: what is written in your passport, what is your company Outlook account, what is your LinkedIn profile, what appears on your airline boarding pass, and what is written on your Starbucks cup?

The passport romanization site aithley.com has organized a very concrete case:

✦ “Kevin had chosen this English name and used it for three years. His LinkedIn profile was Kevin, his company business card said Kevin... until one time, an American client checked his identity against his passport... So your name is Chia-hao, not Kevin?”²²

That customs or client interrogation is a shared experience of all adults in the “Kevin system.” Kevin has been in use for three years; the business card, Outlook, and LinkedIn are all familiar with it, but the passport says Chia-hao Lin. Overseas KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures check against the passport. At that moment, three years of workplace branding and legal identity split apart on the table.

Anne Chang wrote about the perspective from the other side on Medium: when she hears others call her Anne, it feels “warm and everyday”; when she hears her romanized name, she “instinctively sits up straight,” entering a formal, official state²³. The same person, called by two names, activates two bodily postures. Anne belongs to the classroom and the cafe; the romanized name belongs to the government and the bank.

The workplace layer has also been institutionalized. A post on Dcard’s tech_job board records that TSMC employees can change their English names in the HR system²⁴. Pull the lens in closer: a 2014 post on PTT’s Tech_Job board wrote that because there were too many duplicate names in the company, the author was coded as “YC13_chen,” the 13th employee in the company named YC_chen²⁵. An English name ultimately became a serial number. In a 2015 BuzzOrange report, Tunghai University associate professor Huang Ying-mei explained that English names can “bring people closer to one another and free them from rank and position”; 104 Job Bank chief HR officer Chung Wen-hsiung explained that English names are “relatively easy to ‘tag’ and help ‘search conversation history’”²⁶. One is a cultural explanation (de-authoritarianization), the other an engineering explanation (database searchability). Only together are they complete.

📝 Curator’s Note
The childhood English name was assigned. The adult romanized name is locked in by law. In between is a period when you think you have naming authority: you think you chose Kevin, and you also think you chose Kevin as your LinkedIn account. But in reality, the line on the passport has determined since the year you were born what customs will ask you in adulthood. The act of naming never truly returned to your hands; only the person asking the question changed.

Adding a Passport Alias Is NT$1,300 Cheaper Than Changing Your Name

When Kevin and Chia-hao do not reconcile on the passport, the first solution most people think of is “change the passport.” In practice, that solution does not work well, but there is a cheaper way out.

Article 14, Subparagraph 5, Item 1 of the Enforcement Rules of the Passport Act is strict: where “the romanized foreign-language name does not match the national-language pronunciation of the Chinese name. Changes under this item shall be limited to one time”²⁷. In other words, you get one lifetime chance to change the passport foreign-language name on the grounds that “the transliteration is wrong.” After that, there is no second chance.

But Article 14-1 of the same enforcement rules opens another window: the Foreign Alias. The rule states that “after the change, the original foreign-language name shall be listed as an alias, but may be omitted when the passport is next renewed or replaced,” and that “where a second foreign-language alias already exists, one shall be chosen for entry upon the next renewal or replacement, and a second foreign-language alias may not be added again”²⁸. In practice, you can keep the official passport name LIN, CHIA-HAO while also adding “Kevin Lin” as a foreign-language alias, with both printed on the same page. The application fee is NT$1,300; standard processing takes 10 working days, rush processing three days²⁸.

aithley.com gives a blunt cost assessment of this path: “Unless the passport romanization issue has truly caused practical professional or legal trouble, the cost of changing a 10-year brand is usually higher than the benefit”; “keep the existing English name while applying to have it registered as a passport English alias, allowing the two to coexist”²². In other words, instead of changing a Kevin that has been used for 10 years, add it into the passport and let customs see “LIN, CHIA-HAO (aka Kevin Lin).” Identity alignment is completed in three seconds.

Taiwanese society gave a demonstration of name changing in 2021. That year, a sushi chain promotion let people named “salmon” eat free salmon; 331 people went to household registration offices to change their names, an episode known as the “Salmon Chaos”²⁹. The response from Chang Wan-yi, director of the Department of Household Registration at the Ministry of the Interior, later became a famous line: “Once you use up your name-change quota, you really will be true to the name ‘salmon’”³⁰. Under Article 9 of the Name Act, each person may change their name three times in a lifetime. A follow-up four years later found that of the 331 “salmons,” 80% had already changed back to their original names, while 20% were still living under salmon names; records of changed names remain permanently in household registration files²⁹.

A passport foreign-language name and the Chinese name on a national ID card are two separate lines. The former is “limited to one time”; the latter is “limited to three times.” But both teach the same lesson: in Taiwan, once a name is written on official documents, it carries weight, and turning back has a cost. So the cheaper route, adding an alias for NT$1,300, is in fact an institutional compromise. It says: “You do not have to change that Kevin assigned to you in childhood; we will let it coexist with the romanized name on the same page.”

Kolas’s Father’s Japanese Name: Indigenous Peoples Were Named Three Times

So far, this naming history has centered on Han Taiwanese. But some people in Taiwan were named three times, and those three instances were not a soft cultural structure. The state acted directly.

On February 11, 1940, an auspicious day in Imperial Year 2600, the Government-General of Taiwan issued Ordinance No. 19 amending the household registration rules and launching soshi-kaimei, the creation of family names and changing of given names. Wikipedia’s entry on the Kōminka Movement summarizes the figures: “By the end of 1941, around 1% of the total population of Taiwan had changed their names. From 1940 to 1943, the number of people who changed their names totaled 126,000. With Taiwan’s total population in 1943 at around 6.13 million, those who changed their names accounted for about 2.06% of the population”³¹. By comparison, the Japanese Sankei Shimbun culture editor Yoshihiro Kita summarized the contemporaneous figure for Korea as: “Korea, 80% ‘soshi-kaimei’; Taiwan, a few percent ‘name changing’”³². Taiwan at 2% and Korea at 80% differed not in willingness but in institutional design. Taiwan used a “permit system + conditional review” (a household had to use Japanese regularly and display imperial-subject qualities); Korea used “voluntary reporting,” but those who refused were excluded from food rations, public office, and were prioritized for forced-labor conscription³¹.

The war ended in 1945. On May 21, 1946, the Nationalist government promulgated the Amended Measures for the People of Taiwan Province to Restore Their Original Names, requiring everyone in Taiwan to change Japanese names from the Japanese colonial period back into Chinese names within three months³³. For families under Japanese rule, this was a matter of refilling Chinese characters; for Indigenous peoples, it was linguistic destruction, because their traditional names had no corresponding Chinese characters. Relevant research at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Ethnology records:

✦ “Under the pressure of completing the process within three months... household registration offices used Mandarin dictionaries and other general dictionaries to randomly assign names to Indigenous people... situations arose in which entire tribes or villages were assigned names collectively in order to facilitate registration.”³⁴

From the 1950s onward, large numbers of Indigenous people received new surnames such as “Kao” (referring to the “high mountain peoples”), “Pan” (a water radical added to the character for “barbarian”), “Tang” (river imagery), “Yang” (a tall tree), and “Wu” (a goddess or shaman). People of the same clan, because they had been assigned to different household registration offices, might receive different Han surnames, “causing situations in Indigenous society where members of the same clan and even family had different Han surnames”³⁴. The consequences extended all the way to later cases of relatives marrying without knowing their kinship³⁴.

The name rectification movement began in the 1980s and advanced every few years:

On May 14, 2024, the Legislative Yuan passed a Name Act amendment on third reading, allowing Indigenous names to appear alone on national ID cards in Roman letters without accompanying Chinese characters³⁵. That same year, Kolas Yotaka became, under the new law, the first person in Taiwan whose national ID card fully removed Chinese characters¹. In a 2018 interview with the China Times, she mentioned her name: “Yotaka is my father’s Japanese name,” the night hawk, きよたか². The Indigenous name Kolas Yotaka, carried by an Amis daughter, bears the Japanese sound registered for her father in the household records during the kōminka period. Three layers of naming history are stacked on the same ID card: Japanese colonial name → Sinicized name → name rectification.

⚠️ Do Not Write This Line as an Equal Sign
Han Taiwanese children being named Mary in cram school and Indigenous people being randomly assigned Han surnames by the state using dictionaries can be structurally connected, but must not be equated. The former is a soft cultural structure plus parental choice under globalization; most parents actively sent their children into children’s English classes. The latter is state violence: a three-month deadline, dictionaries flipped at random, the rupture of clan systems across an entire generation. Both are indeed cases of “naming authority being handed over,” but the weight of that transfer is different, and so is the cost of return. The comparison table names the structural feature of “not being able to name oneself,” not an equivalence between the two events.

From Cram-School Teachers to the SSA Top Names List

Return to children’s English classes after the 2010s.

The names in the classroom have changed. Mary, John, Kevin, and Peter are still in the textbooks, but they are no longer the names that five-year-old newcomers receive when entering class. popmama has organized the fashionable choices of Taiwanese parents after the 2010s: girls’ names such as Chloe, Zoe, Olivia, Emma, Ava, Sophia, Isabella, and Mia; boys’ names such as Aiden, Liam, Ethan, Noah, Mason, and Jacob³⁶. These names were not given by cram-school teachers. Parents chose them themselves.

The reference sources for choosing names also changed. Teachers in the 1980s relied on memory: their own textbooks, what older students had used, what their own teachers had taught them. Parents in the 2010s scrolled on their phones through the SSA top names list, the annual baby-name statistics published by the U.S. Social Security Administration, while following American TV dramas and Hollywood films. The location of the act of naming moved one step earlier: from the cram-school teacher’s podium to the parents’ living room.

Barešová and Pikhart’s paper also recorded this trend toward earlier ages: among respondents under 30, most received their first English name between ages 8 and 11; among those 31 and older, most did so between ages 12 and 13⁵. In other words, each generation pushed it forward by three to four years. Extend the line further downward, and for the bilingual-kindergarten generation of the 2020s, the age of receiving an English name has already moved forward to 3 to 5 — before school age.

📝 Curator’s Note
Naming authority seems to be coming home: from cram-school teachers back to parents, then from parents back to children themselves (changing from Mary to Chloe in high school is a common path). But at the same time, the age at which naming intervenes is also moving earlier: from 8 to 5 to 3. The speed of return and the speed of intervention both accelerate, canceling each other out. So the moment of “when do I truly get to decide what I am called?” may never really arrive. It is merely deferred to the next identity document, such as university records, passport, immigration file, or workplace brand, and handed to the next system for further interrogation.

Hong Kong offers a comparative figure: according to a 2015 survey by Bacon-Shone, Bolton, and Luke at the University of Hong Kong’s Social Sciences Research Centre, “25.8% of Hongkongers have English given names in their legal names, while another 38.3% use English names in everyday life even though those are not in their legal names” — a combined 64.1%³⁷. The key difference is this: Hong Kong English names can enter the Hong Kong identity card; in Taiwan, English names remain classroom nicknames forever, unable to enter the national ID card or the official passport name field³⁸. Hong Kong has a legal status supported by colonial history; Taiwan has only cram-school tuition paid by parents themselves.

Kolas Yotaka on a 2024 national ID card is currently the farthest marker in Taiwan’s naming history: a name once rewritten by colonizers has finally come home on its own identity card. But at that same moment, on the first day of class at a children’s English school somewhere in Taipei, a teacher stands before a five-year-old child, glances at a list, and announces: “You are Olivia.” Olivia receives this name while still learning Zhuyin, Taiwan’s Mandarin phonetic symbols.

Between Yotaka and Olivia lie 86 years.

The act of being assigned a name was never abolished. Only the person handing out names changed.

Further Reading

• Loanwords and Language Contact in Taiwan — From borrowings among Japanese, English, and Taiwanese, see how Taiwan’s multilingual layers stack up
• Taiwan’s Indigenous Language Revitalization Movement — Another line in the recovery of naming authority, from Indigenous-language revitalization through the 2024 Name Act amendment
• Chiung Wi-vun — A parallel extension of the “de-Sinicization” logic in the Tâi-gí writing movement, and another side of naming and script sovereignty
• Taiwan Sensibility — A curatorial view of cultural mentality, offering another layer for understanding why Taiwanese people so often feel they need a foreign-language name

Image Sources

(Hero and scene images to be inserted during Stage 4 media weaving. Expected anchors: first-day scene in a children’s English classroom; 1987 Sesame Street English “NO CHINESE, ENGLISH PLEASE” advertisement; official MOFA passport romanization table screenshot; 2024 news photo of Kolas Yotaka’s national ID card; Taipei street-sign comparison of Kwangfu vs Guangfu.)

References