Say My (Sur)Name!

You know sometimes it takes a while to respond when you hear someone calling your name? Just hear the muted shout in the back of your mind kinda like an echo, you turn and half-wonder whether it's your imagination.

Then I hear someone calling my name.

And it surprised me. You know it's been a while since secondary school when you don't recognize your own surname after it's been yelled several times from twenty feet away. Reminds me so much of PE lessons when the belligerent coach would yell at us! Certainly underlines the fact that surnames remain so much more important in a man's world than in a lady's.


What? Did you call me?
Really. Have you noticed?

A peculiar double standard perhaps? Girls call each other by their personal names ( a sign of intimacy maybe? ) while boys prefer sticking to their surnames. Even as men, it seems to be the norm to address each other by our surnames. For instance, you'd never hear Holmes and Watson refer to each other as Sherlock and John! A quiant reminder of our colonial past perhaps? Or maybe perhaps in our patrician Confucian-world, clan, lineage and family names just seem to carry more importance for the boys.

Like my brother and his classmates who still call each other by their surnames till now! Johnson! Chong! Lim!

I'd be expecting their dads to answer!

Sure I do use my surname at work - tagged to the salutation Dr. But these days hardly anyone I know personally days calls me that. They usually just tag me as Paul at the most. Reason enough it took a while before I turned around when my old classmate called my (sur)name.