Why does this family have that last name?

January 3, 2008 2:53 PM

Bizarre curiosity: This family appears to be Asian. Their surname is Irish. What's the deal?

I realize the only way to know for sure is to ask them, but I don't know them well at all, and don't really have a good reason for wanting to know the origin of their last name. Curiosity, that's all.

I know there are a billion reasons why people have the names they do, but this one strikes me as particularly unusual since both the mother and father appear to be of Asian descent. I haven't heard them speak any language other than English and don't have any other clues as to what specific nationality they might be. The parents have pretty common American names (ie, John, Mary) and the grown kids have more modern American names (ie, Brittany, Zack).

I am honestly just curious as to whether there's a cultural history that I don't know.

Any general ideas on why an Asian family might have an Irish name? Or is this more likely something specific to this family's history?

posted by Ruby Doomsday to Society & Culture (26 answers total)

Its probably specific. For example, the father might have been adopted.
posted by vacapinta at 2:56 PM on January 3, 2008 [1 favorite]

The father was adopted by an Irish family? If they all seem completely American, that would be my first guess.
posted by Julnyes at 2:56 PM on January 3, 2008

Well, this isn't tremendously common, but sometimes Asian immigrant families, instead of picking a English spelling of their last name, will actually change their last name to something Anglo. I've known a few families that have done that.

Also, there could have been an Irish ancestor on the dad's side a generaton or two back, and the Irish-blood could be a really small percentage of the dad, too. Most asians in the US are recent immigrants, but some have been here 3 - 4 generations or more.
posted by waylaid at 3:02 PM on January 3, 2008

Or the father's father may have been Irish, and mother Asian or Asian-American.
posted by occhiblu at 3:02 PM on January 3, 2008

Another possibility of course is that the Father really does have an Irish surname because, say, his great-grandfather was Irish.

If his 7 other great-grandparents were all Asian, its possible to have not much of those Irish genes while still carrying the surname,
posted by vacapinta at 3:03 PM on January 3, 2008

Well, this isn't tremendously common, but sometimes Asian immigrant families, instead of picking a English spelling of their last name, will actually change their last name to something Anglo. I've known a few families that have done that.

Me, too. I see Korean families tending to do that quite a bit.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:04 PM on January 3, 2008

I swore a friend of mine was half-Asian even though she had an Irish first name. I soon learned her last name was Irish too and her ancestors were 100% from that wee isle.
posted by yeti at 3:04 PM on January 3, 2008

Anecdote: A very good friend of mine has an Asian first name and an Irish last name. Her great grandfather was Irish. She just went to Ireland this past summer, back to her great grandfathers home town. All the old men at the bar couldn't believe she was part Irish. She pulled up the phone book and found a few people in town that shared her last name.
posted by special-k at 3:07 PM on January 3, 2008

Is the last name O Young or something like that? There are a very few Chinese surnames that are romanized into O something, so it looks Irish.
posted by Calloused_Foot at 3:12 PM on January 3, 2008

One of my friends is surnamed 蕭 (Xiao) - their family romanized it to Shaw when they moved here.

Can't say this works for someone named O'Hanrahan.
posted by casarkos at 3:13 PM on January 3, 2008

My last name appears to be of Irish origin : Huie.

I'm Chinese and my last name is 許, and its normally romanized in the forms Xu, Hsu, Hui, Huie.

Care to provide their last name?
posted by mphuie at 3:21 PM on January 3, 2008

Response by poster: Interesting perspectives. Thanks for your feedback. At least now I know it's probably something specific to their family rather than some cultural trend I just didn't know about. The last name is one that begins with "O'," by the way.
posted by Ruby Doomsday at 3:30 PM on January 3, 2008

Maybe relevant, the Michael Goldberg story: "Mr. Goldberg, a Sikh who is married with one child, was born in India, Mr. Sejarto said, adding that he adopted a Jewish name when he moved to New York City."
posted by iviken at 3:33 PM on January 3, 2008

Is the last name Ohara? It's of Japanese origin.
posted by chez shoes at 3:35 PM on January 3, 2008

There is a relatively rare* Asian (Chinese) last name Au Young (pronounced ow "as in an owie when you stub your toe" yerng) that I've sometimes seen it spelled O-Young.

*it's rare for Chinese surnames to be two syllables but Au-Young and another which escapes me right now are the more common of the uncommon surnames
posted by porpoise at 3:35 PM on January 3, 2008

Let's not forget the possibility of a misspelling originating somewhere in the family tree. MeFi's own languagehat posted about how Sartorius became Sadorus which became Sedoris and then got changed to Scdoris and stuck.
posted by Kattullus at 3:47 PM on January 3, 2008

Are you sure it was an Irish last name? This family could very well be from Eastern Europe or Central Asia or Russia or a host of other places where Genghis Khan had spread his seed.
posted by cazoo at 4:08 PM on January 3, 2008

a woman i know (of chinese descent) told me about how her great-grandfather had literally won some irishman's kid in a poker game in chicago at the turn of the century. the boy grew up speaking perfect chinese.

maybe there was a trade? more likely that the dad was adopted and/or raised by nuns or something.

i would just ask. it's not an outrageous question--they probably get it all the time.
posted by thinkingwoman at 5:14 PM on January 3, 2008

and o'hara is an irish name, btw. i don't know if ohara is japanese, but hara is.
posted by thinkingwoman at 5:15 PM on January 3, 2008

Why would an Asian-Irish-American family seem odd? Ethnic phenotype is a poor predictor of national origin. Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) was an Irish-American. My college roommate, who was from Donegal, looked West African (his mother was German, his father was African-American). Many Chinese-Americans are also Irish-Americans: marriage between 1st generation female Irish and male Chinese immigrants being so common as to become a 19th century music hall comedy staple.
posted by meehawl at 5:15 PM on January 3, 2008

I would guess that a grandfather somewhere was Irish, and they had sons that carried on the Irish name. The author Lisa See uses her maiden name, which is passed down from her Chinese great-great-grandfather via his sons, but thanks to both her mother and her paternal grandmother being white/redheads, and the dilution of the Asian genes, looks like your bogstandard white person. Her book On Gold Mountain, which I found via another AskMefi question is outstandingly interesting if you're into the history of Asian immigration, or even just American immigration in general. It's now one of my all time favorite reads.

Bear in mind that once upon a time, Irish and Chinese people were both considered to be on the bottom rung of society - doing manual labour and segregated off as un-American. It wasn't unheard of (although totally illegal in California for some time) for mixed race marriages to occur. White male/Asian female couplings are also more common than the other way around - sons are the providers (especially the eldest), and therefore have the pressure to stay traditional, whereas women are taken into the husband's families as a new daughter and their families are/were expected to give gifts alongside.

Another answer could be that a more American name could have been adopted after immigration - my boyfriend is Chinese*, and got made fun of in his last job for having a Chinese middle name. If that still goes on now, imagine how it would have been when the first generation of this Asian family emigrated over.

Or like others have said: you could be misreading the name, or someone along the paternal line could be adopted. It's interesting stuff, this American culture.

I would ask them. It's an extremely unpopular thing to approach someone and ask where they came from, but you can always preface it with an apology and explain that you're trying to educate yourself in regards to Asian-American history and you don't mean to offend them.

*hence my interest in this topic ;)
posted by saturnine at 7:16 PM on January 3, 2008

Thirding the O-yang/Ouyang/O'Young thing. It's a somewhat unusual but very valid Chinese surname. It was my first hunch when I read the short blurb on the front page. The characters are 欧阳/歐陽, and it's writen Ouyang in standard pinyin.
posted by msittig at 7:22 PM on January 3, 2008

Ohara is indeed a Japanese surname. There was even a short-lived late-80s cop show with that name, starring Pat Morita (TV's Arnold) in the title role. But hopefully that's not the name of the family in question, or there'd be much forehead-slapping here. It's definitely not any more Irish than "Obama."

If you're familiar with the family that you could actually ask just to quench your curiosity, I'm sure they wouldn't mind. It's America after all. Personally, I'd just assume that the dad (or someone in his family line) was adopted at some point, or took a step-parent's name, or went into the witness protection program. Same as if you saw a white family with an Asian surname, etc.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 1:22 AM on January 4, 2008

It's definitely not any more Irish than "Obama."

Obama is also, apparently, Irish-American.
posted by meehawl at 9:13 PM on January 4, 2008

Obama is also, apparently, Irish-American

Straying off-topic, but I remember hearing that he was distantly related to either Dick Cheney, or George W. Bush. Apparently, it's both.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 11:14 PM on January 4, 2008

I have a Korean friend who was adopted by a well-meaning Scotish-heritage family. Their last name was "Rice."
posted by herbaliser at 12:43 PM on January 7, 2008