English First Names for Chinese Americans

When I worked at Google, I once did an employee search on “Vivian” and 26 of the 30 results were Chinese. This post examines this phenomenon a bit more scientifically, with two goals:

• Find the most common English first names for Chinese last names (P(Name n | Chinese)).
• Find the English first names that are differentially expressed — that is, which are much more popular among Chinese Americans than among the general American public (i.e., P(Chinese | Name n)).

The ideal approach would be to download a phone book and tally the first names for Chinese last names. While there’s nowhere to download a phone book, there are several searchable people databases online. The largest and most famous free option is ZabaSearch.

The first step: get a list of Chinese last names to search for. I used the 100 most common last names in both the natural Pinyin and Wade-Giles variants, for a total of 128 unique last names. With a script, I searched for each on ZabaSearch. Sadly, Zaba won’t show you the results if there are over 1000 — it just says “1000’s of CHIN’s found!” If you search across the entire U.S., then this happens for too many of the names, so I limited my searches to Boston. The 128 last names culled 22,483 unique people (after also de-duping by address).

Among Chinese in Boston, the most common three first names are Wei (1.34%), Hong (0.916%) and Hui (0.836%). Only about 25% — 5,949 of 22,483 — of the first names are English.

Of the Chinese population with English first names, the most popular three male and female names are shown below. For the American public, these are downloaded from the latest census report. (Note: To standardize the population sizes, I limited both populations to those with first names in the top 500.)

Name

Rank across America

Rank among Chinese

Frequency across America

Frequency among Chinese

DAVID

6

1

0.0286

0.0511

JOHN

2

2

0.0396

0.0378

JAMES

1

3

0.0402

0.0369

Name

Rank across America

Rank among Chinese

Frequency across America

Frequency among Chinese

JENNIFER

6

1

0.01300

0.0311

AMY

32

2

0.00631

0.0303

ANGELA

29

3

0.00655

0.0178

The three most popular Chinese male first names are also very popular in America as a whole. A more interesting question is the one about P(Chinese | Name n) — which English first names are much more common among Chinese Americans than among all Americans? To answer that, I conducted a binomial proportion test and sorted the results by p-value, identifying the most extreme differences. The top 10 male and female differences are given below.

Some of the top results are nicknames — Chinese are much more likely to pick “Andy” or “Jenny” as a legal name, while general Americans are formally named by the longer versions.

The other names on the list are more interesting. For males, “Andrew,” “Eric,” “Peter” and “Albert” are much more common among Chinese than among Americans. For females, it’s “Amy,” “Grace,” “May” and, yes, “Vivian.” By comparing the frequencies, you can see that these names are all over five times more popular among Chinese Americans!

I’ll leave interpretation to the sociologists.

Name

Frequency across America

Frequency among Chinese

p-value

ANDREW

0.006510

0.02810

2.2e-30

ANDY

0.000594

0.00937

2.0e-26

DAN

0.001220

0.01120

3.6e-23

PETER

0.004620

0.01990

5.3e-22

ALBERT

0.003810

0.01570

7.0e-17

ERIC

0.006590

0.02120

1.5e-16

ALAN

0.002470

0.01150

2.9e-14

SAM

0.001110

0.00786

3.7e-14

ALEX

0.001390

0.00846

1.4e-13

DAVID

0.028600

0.05110

1.7e-12

Name

Frequency across America

Frequency among Chinese

p-value

AMY

0.006310

0.03030

2.5e-29

JENNY

0.000951

0.01330

6.9e-28

GRACE

0.002640

0.01670

4.3e-21

MAY

0.000406

0.00644

3.1e-15

VIVIAN

0.001650

0.01100

5.2e-15

ALICE

0.004990

0.01780

3.5e-13

JENNIFER

0.013000

0.03110

2.7e-12

CECILIA

0.000769

0.00644

6.8e-11

JANE

0.003500

0.01290

2.7e-10

CINDY

0.002690

0.01060

2.2e-09