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- If you’ve read my articles on the 2017 BC provincial election or the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, you’ll know I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of non-Chinese political candidates choosing Chinese names. I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name—to the ridiculous—BC Green Party candidate Greg Powell’s (格雷戈里) bewildering word soup. I’m delighted to see that this year we’ve even had some news coverage of multilingual campaigning from the University of British Columbia’s student newspaper (their conclusion: nobody knows if it works or why anybody does it).
Man. That's fascinating. And a stark cultural difference between BC and Washington. I have many friends in BC and visit often. So the variety of issues that swirl around the Chinese community in BC are all things I am very aware of. But then for politicians in the area to specifically speak to that community by adopting a Chinese name in the political campaigning... there would be nothing more damaging to an American politician, and many of them (like Ted Cruz) have specifically changed their "ethnic-sounding" names to seem more "American". (But really, what could be more American than an ethnic-sounding name, in a country populated almost entirely by immigrants?)