There's a new advert on the radio waves in Malaysia - its a Dockers ad. In it, Tiger Woods is somehow squeezed into the equation and hearing his name repeated a few times made me think about it. "Tiger Woods" - what sort of name is that? What sort of parent will name a child after a beast of the jungle? Of course, its turned out that this name has proven very apt - Tiger Woods is a household name, a name that strikes fear in his fellow golfers, and name that thousands of children all over the world pretend to own.
"I'm Tiger Woods," the boy in the Nike ad professes. Indeed.
My own name, Aizuddin Danian Izham Cheong, has its own history. In fact, its the third name i've had in this life.
When i was born, it was an estatic time in the life of my grandmother, my father's mother. She took it as a blessing from the Gods that i looked Chinese. When dad married mom, grandmom had feared the worst: there would be no male heir for the Cheong family who looked chinese (my father's brother had earlier married a lady of pakistani descent). It is rumoured that when i popped out of my mom as a spanking clean 10 pound baby, grandmom had whispered to mom, "Finally, you've done something right." Haha!
Upon birth, my given name was Cheong Soon Yee, a name that was picked by my grandmother over the wishes of my mom who wanted a malay name for me. Roughly translated i think it means, "Trusted Fish" or something along those lines.
Obviously, my mom was more than a bit peeved that grandmom had jumped the gun in the naming game, and she quickly hit back, nearly before the ink was dry on my birth cert. I was named Damian Cheong - the surname was given prominence as a compromise, but there was no trace of my malay heritage anyway.
And so this name stuck for a period of 7 years or so. Then, the movie "The Omen" was released, and it was soon time for another change.
The primary school kids teased me to no end because my name matched that of the main character in the movie, the unfortunate Son of Satan. Kids would pull my hair, looking for the imprinted "666"; they would shy away from me, fearful that by being close to me, they would meet their end just like the many victims in the movie. Such a situation, you can imagine left me in great despair, got me into many a fight, and gave me tremendous self-esteem issues.
So one day, i couldn't stand it anymore and asked my mom to let me change my name. In hindsight, i think mom was looking for an excuse to make this happen: for practical reasons (e.g. Bumiputra children are given preferential treatment in such critical areas as education), she wanted my name to be a greater reflection of malay-ness.
She agreed, gave me a book of muslim names and asked me to choose. I was a kid, easily distracted and this is the most likely reason why i didn't get past the alphabet "A" section of names. I settled on Aizuddin and told mom my choice. The rest is history. One wonders what would have happened is i had started the book from back to front...
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