Documents for New Baby

[Gemma]

I did the same as inkmink. My husband doesn't have a formal Chinese surname. My dad thought of one for him over a meal of Peking duck!

Also, in your context you really only need to have an English name (surname will be yours obviously) within a certain amount of time. You can take your time with the Chinese name. We only finally decided on a Chinese name for our son after 12 months (I know - pathetic) and I have yet to add it to his birth certificate. Think it's $180 to add a name or something.

 

[inkmink]

Ruza - you can put whatever you like as said by Nicolejoy. Yes, my daughter 's given Chinese name on birth cert has 3 characters including my surname. The hk birth cert's chinese name section also doesn't have a surname box like the English section. Because of this, they had to show the Chinese surname in the Chinese given name section and "treat it" as a Chinese given name ONLY on the birth cert.

The registrar told me to explain to hk immigration if I encounter any problems. So far, I haven't have the need to explain to anyone. I have applied hkid, hk passport, home return permit as well as bringing daughter out of hk a couple of times.

For home return permit, yes, they require Chinese name and the form has to be filled in Chinese including address!

 

[nicolejoy]

One thing that I HAVE heard of is that if you choose a "non-traditional" romanisation of the Chinese name, you need to sign that you know that it's spelt "wrong" and you choose to have it spelt that way. I also have friends who did that for various reasons, and it was ok, they just had to acknowledge that it was not spelt the conventional way... not sure if that's relevant to you or not though!!

 

[evgreen]

Hi Nicole joy...might be a silly question but how do I indicate this to immigration? I might want my daughters Chinese name romanized in pinyin mandarin instead of Cantonese....

 

[nicolejoy]

I think that pinyin or cantonese are both fine with the birth certificate place - just if you want it spelt "uniquely" for whatever reason... one of my friends chose a Chinese name which sounded similar to an English name which is not spelt how it should be romanised in either Mandarin or Cantonese - and it was in that situation that they needed to sign off that they knew it wasn't how it should be romanised. Another friend chose a name which looked funny in English, so they spelt it differently, more how an English speaker would pronounce it, and less "rude" looking... and they also had to sign off on it. It's no big deal, they just want to make sure that you know what you're naming your kid. Now if only they would do that for all the poor Chinese kids called something like "Milk" or "Demon" out there...

 

[miran]

Dont know if this is relevant; but a few of our freinds have given their kids surnames which are not the surname their dads (respectively) carry. At the time of applying for birth certificate you have to put in this request - and firmly. They allot you a senior officer and if there is a reason enough the officer agrees.

However, in all the cases I know of the parents belonged to a part of India where traditionally children take father's first name as the surname.

Apologies if this is completely usless info

 

[charade]

Miran, last year my husband who is from that part of India argued for about an hour with the officer and his manager at the birth registry. They refused to go with anything other than the father's last name (well, maybe they would have considered mother's last name but to my undying irritation my husband would not consider that). Finally, they said that birth certificate does not have a last name anyway... so just get whatever name you want put on the baby's passport. It's true that the birth certificate (in English) does not have a last name column; however the sticker they gave us for immigration has my husband's last name as my son's last name (not what we wanted) which means on some record somewhere that is the name registered. We were able to get the name we wanted on the Indian passport but it irritates me that the birth registry is so fascist about naming. I have a feeling they are more rigid with Chinese people because they told my husband for Chinese people this is how they do it - to which my husband pointed out we are not Chinese.

Apologies also that this is not relevant to the original thread. However, if anyone did manage to negotiate variation from the father's last name or else dictum in recent times please let me know as I will need to fight this battle again for my second child.