A rose by any other name

"I'd recommend you omit your visa status, your date of birth and anything that shows you were in Malaysia", a lady at the Job Network services told me. "Remove anything that shows you're Asian."

She was perhaps politically incorrect, but her heart was in the right place. And her point of view was reiterated again and again. X's friend couldn't fathom my jobhunting dilemma. A nice man on the British forums offered to look over my CV and told me his wife, a Singaporean faced the same problem.

What I would do is remove the education in Malaysia, the hobbies and interests section. Also let me say my wife is a Phd from Singapore/Malaysia and we noticed the difference when she used my surname versus her own and removed reference from Singapore and emphasised her UK Masters and PHD from cambridge. One client even initially asked the agency if she could speak english (despite obvious tertiary qualifications from the UK). So don't take it personally, its not ethically right what they do but you need a job and for the sake of moral high ground the end justifies the means.

Jan: Can I use your surname?
X: No. We have to be married.
Jan: Can we get married?
X: No.

Now I know my pseudonym (you didn't really think Jan Banks is my actual name, did you?) depicts a person of Anglo-Saxon heritage, but it's actually an anagram and a teenage nickname.

Even Kal Penn (Kumar of Harold and Kumar, and the guy from House M.D.'s team) faced the same problem. Nevermind he was actually brought up in the States. From Wikipedia, Penn says that he chose the stage name Kal Penn (from Kalpen Suresh Modi) as a lark: “Almost as a joke to prove friends wrong, and half as an attempt to see if what I was told would work (that anglicized names appeal more to a white-dominated industry), I put ‘Kal Penn’ on my resume and photos." His audition callbacks rose by 50 percent. Penn has stated that he prefers his birth name and uses "Kal Penn" only for professional purposes.

A recruiter I met last week put it into perspective for me. Due to the increasing number of international students flooding the Aussie uni market, universities have become lax about letting them all get their degrees. Word of mouth is good for business, yes? 87% of the local accounting grads can't even string an English sentence together, and as a result, are unable to effectively execute their duties. "They graduate expecting to find a job and get their PR's and end up working in restaurants and retail.

"Employers look at your CV, they're not going to speak to you, they're going to set it aside. So you have to not give them any chance to eliminate you."

What angers me more is the number of colleges unethically set up as immigration offices. It is not uncommon to find these places crowded full of non-English speaking immigrants who are there just to get a visa. They ruin the image of actual bona fide students and workers who are able and willing to work. Is this an elitist view? Probably. But the way I see it, if you choose to move to a foreign country, you have to learn to integrate and contribute. If you're going to segregate yourself and not even bother picking up the local lingo, then what are you doing here? You are the representative of your culture and country. Many people here (Australians and otherwise) are most likely to encounter less than 5 Malaysians in their lifetime (unless their line of work happens to deal with heaps of us) and whatever impression I give them now, will form their entire view of Malaysia as a country. And mind you, the Australian media does not paint a very pretty picture of my motherland.

Speaking of names, I have a long overdue rant. I'm not actually very fond of my real name. I can't understand why my parents chose such an awkward, unabbreviate-able misnomer for me. Why couldn't I be named something like Ai Ling or Mei Ling or Li Na etc etc? Nooo.... they found the strangest sounding possible title and decided (too late) that they couldn't quite live with it. And end up calling me Jan instead.

And the worst part is, Jan is not part of my birth certificate/ passport. My extremely pro-Chinese father refused to anglicize my name because "Chinese people should have Chinese names and have Chinese babies in China."

I am 99.9% certain I am the only person on planet Earth with my name. My research is backed up by hours of egosurfing. For that, I am grateful. I wouldn't want anyone else to go through a childhood full of confectionary and nut-related nicknames either.