#netflix collateral

[spaceytrash]

Don't mind me I'm just in love with how good John Simm looks in Collateral

[travelingstrawberry]

Ok so Collateral randomly jumped out at me on Netflix, and you’d think I wouldn’t start watching it at 10pm on a weekday and I have work the next day. But I started it anyway because OMG Carey Mulligan.

Long story short, I got hooked and didn’t get to sleep until 2.

This post isn’t to rave about how good this series is (though it is. There are so many great women in this show y’all, please go watch it.). No, it’s about the fact that the name of Kae Alexander’s character …keeps bugging me.

Linh Xuan Huy.

On the surface, it looks very Vietnamese. And as individual names, all three are VERY Vietnamese names.

It’s just…together…really?

Okay, first off, it’s not an impossible Vietnamese name, but whichever way you put it, it’s a very unusual name.

Linh is fine as her given name. I have nothing to say about that.

It’s just the other two that bugs me.

Obviously Linh Xuan Huy is given in Western order, which is Given – Middle? – Family. But Vietnamese order would be Family – Middle – Given.

The problem is neither Xuan nor Huy are common as a Vietnamese family name. I repeat, it’s not impossible for someone to have Xuan or Huy as a family name, as there is no real set of names, family or otherwise, in Vietnamese. But considering this is a country where 40% of people have the same family name, family names in general tend to be very homogenous. Which makes an unusual family really stick out.

Double the problem is the fact that both Xuan and Huy are typically middle and given names. But specifically, they are both more commonly MALE middle name.

Huy is 99% of the time a male name, regardless of whether it is a given or a middle name.

Xuan is unisex as a given name, but as a middle name, it is almost always given to a boy (unless accompanied by Thi which is another essay altogether). God knows why Xuan is almost always a male middle name because it actually means spring, as in the season which is usually very girly. (Trust me, this is my middle name, and I have spent my whole life being mistaken for a guy.) (Gendered name is very much a thing in Vietnamese naming so don’t tell me that there is more than just gender binary.)

(Or you know, she’s trans and never bothered to change her legal name.)

Anyway, what the hell is her actual name in Vietnamese?

Best guess is Huy Xuan Linh, which is quite unusual, but between “Xuan Linh” and “Huy Linh”, “Xuan Linh” is a more likely name for girl. “Huy Linh” is very male. And Xuan is even more bizarre a family name than Huy.

I’m tagging @useless-vietnamfacts because it seems like the kind of discourse you might be interested in...)