Chelo

“Chloe”, called the teacher read­ing out the class roll. There was no answer. She called sev­eral more times, before adding the miss­ing student’s fam­ily name.
“Chloe Tan?”

Still no response. And it didn’t make sense because the num­ber on the roll didn’t tally with the num­ber of stu­dents in the class. Chloe had to be here and not respond­ing to her name being called, for some rea­son. The teacher then went down to the only child who hadn’t responded to the roll call and asked, “Chloe? Why didn’t you answer when I called your name?”, to which the child answered, “but that is not my name”.

Point­ing to the name on the roll, the teacher asked again, “this is your name isn’t it?”

The child then very inno­cently replied, “yes, but my father and mother call me ‘Chelo’.”

That and other tales of par­ents nam­ing their kids Anglo-Celtic-Judaic-European names and then mis­pro­nounc­ing them were exchanged by troop­ers wait­ing for our last parade to assem­ble last Sat­ur­day. There was also the story of how peo­ple were late for a ‘Jeremy’s’ birth­day party because the ban­ner at the party venue read ‘Happy Birth­day Jerome’. It took a while but it was finally explained by the birth­day boy that he was named ‘Jerome’, but that his par­ents pro­nounce it as ‘Jer-o-me’, and that’s what he has always answered to.

It’s not dyslexia, obviously. Any other non-European, non-Roman alphabet-using ethnic group would have difficulty even approximating the correct pronunciation of their given names, and Mandarin pinyinisation has simply given Chinese in this country names just as foreign-sounding. Add to that parents who embrace the use of names from other than their own ethnic origin, and you'll get instances of kids telling their teachers, “my name is Pene­lope and it rhymes with antelope”.

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