Poor Little Osama

Tomorrow, as I noted in my last post, I am going to be covering for a teacher at another branch. To do this, I needed information about what the class had done in its last lesson and so forth. Eve spoke to the manager of the branch where I will be teaching and got me the handover sheet (sheets teachers prepare when they know they will be unable to teach a regular class) for the classes I will be covering, including lists of all the students' names.

After Eve handed this to me, I was casually looking through the list and found a very unusual name on one of the lists: Osama. Yes, that's right, Osama. As in, bin Laden. Naturally, I was gobsmacked.

I tried to ask if there was any possibility this child was from a Muslim family. There was not, to my knowledge, any Muslim community in Taiwan, although Wikipedia (not the most reliable source, but what's available to me) indicates that, apparently, 140,000 Taiwanese consider themselves Muslims. But this is a small number in a nation of 23,000,000 inhabitants, and, more likely, either this child or his parents chose the name simply because they liked the sound of it, not out of any Muslim religious or cultural identity.

For what it's worth, as near as I can tell from brief internet research, the name Osama is not associated with any particular religious figure in Islam, like Muhammad or Omar. It is simply an Arabic name meaning "Lion"--equivalent to the Latin Leo or Hebrew Aryeh.

Nonetheless, I remained, and remain, astonished that someone would take on this name in an effort to have a "Western" or "English" name, given its current strong ties to the leader of al-Qaeda. I felt that someone needed to explain to his parents that, if this child were to come to America (or really anywhere else in the West), this name would almost certainly be misinterpreted. I felt that the parents should be made aware of what a bad choice this is for an "English" name, and the child urged to choose another, before he becomes too attached to it.

I'm not sure that Eve and my Chinese Teaching Assistant, Cecilia, completely understood. They told me, essentially, that I was overthinking the issue--that it was just a name, just something to call someone. But I don't think I quite got across to them how much trouble this name could cause this child outside of Taiwan.

In my post about potentially being put in the role of Mr. Bumble, I noted that the Taiwanese do not seem to regard the loss of their traditional names with the same horror that, say, Kunta Kinte reacted to being rechristened Toby. But such a blasse attitude struck me as unfathomable. I thought about Purim, and how we literally blot out Haman's name every year, because it carries such horrific associations. I thought about how, almost overnight, the names Adolf, Adolphus, and Adolph disappeared from birth certificates in the 1930s, never to return. I had a hard time believing that there could be no such names in Chinese culture--no names too horrible to bestow on a child.

For the present, though, I've realized it's best to do nothing, until I know more the facts. If the child's family is Muslim and this name reflects a real cultural or religious identity, so be it. If not, I may have to ask higher-ups in Shane whether anything should be done about the situation. But tomorrow, I actually meet poor little Osama.