Comment by decimalenough
2 days ago
To be more precise, many Singaporean Chinese names are formatted as WESTERN_NAME SURNAME CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_1 CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_PART2. The WESTERN_NAME may or may not be a legal name (AFAIK for Lee Kuan Yew it never was), and to further complicate things it's not unknown for the Chinese name to be duplicated in its dialect and Mandarin readings, leading to "Harry, Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)".
Combine this with Anglocentric IT systems, and I'm sure Mr Lee (RIP) gets a lot of spam addressed to "Mr Yew".
I get this in reverse. My surname is Parks, and my given names are Paul Moore. Since moving to Singapore I've become accustomed to answering to "Parks Paul Moore" in person or on the phone.
Surprisingly, local systems outside of the SG government can still take a maddeningly Western approach to names (First name/last name, assumption that last name is a family name a not a patronymic, etc.). My wife is Singaporean Tamil, so her "last name" is actually her father's given name, and even when travelling around Southeast Asia she encounters issues with this.
Fortunately, the SG government does an admirable job of handling Chinese names (across a number of languages and cultures), Malay names, Indian names of various cultures (mostly Tamil, but also Punjabi, Malayalam, and several others) and of course many Western names. I wish the Western world would catch up.