very long, legal/preferred names, hong kong posting
the ways that hongkongers handle names is super weird now that I think about itLegal Names
most hongkongers have a chinese name, a legal english name, and a western english name, for example:
Chinese Name: 王一心
Legal name on IDs: Wong, Yat Sum
English Name: Chris Wong
That is usually how it goes, but sometimes someone's legal name is "Wong, Yat Sum Chris" or "Wong, Chris Yat Sum" or just "Wong, Chris".
Non-ethnically chinese people sometimes have a Chinese name and English name that are completely distinct from each other, which also adds onto the confusion.
Some hongkongers don't have english names and we sometimes just take their legal given name, pronounce it as below and use that as an english name.
Usage of Names in a Cantonese context
Sometimes just the surname along with an honorific is used, sometimes the full name is used, but rarely is the given name used on its own, afaik. In more casual conversations, we code-switch and use their English names anyway.
Usage of Names in an English context
For more casual contexts we probably use English names. For more formal / legal contexts we seem to use legal names.
Cantonese is a tonal language and the governmental romanization scheme is really weird, so the way we pronounce them is also really weird. We're generally aware of what they should sound like in Cantonese, so we approximate it, discard all the tones and then follow the following conversions (roughly):
vowels generally stay the same, except that /ɐ/ may either be replaced with /a/ or /ʌ/.
consonants generally stay the same, except p, t, k are always aspirated. "Ts" sometimes gets turned into "Ch".
monosyllabic "Ng", a common surname, is still pronounced that way.
sometimes "eu" gets written as a "u" "Chun" or "Chui" and we'd still use the correct pronunciation (/ɵ/ in this case). Other irregularities exist like "Sze" and "Tsz".
How it works in documentation
It depends. Sometimes there's a dedicated field for an English name, sometimes there isn't and we just have to remember / use their Chinese name. most interactions happen in Cantonese anyway.
How it works when we move to the West
Most of our English documentation is in our legal name so that's not too weird, but I usually have my English name registered as a preferred name because I genuinely prefer that. (... I mean, I prefer QuARC and do use it in real life with some people, but not with normal people.)
It still annoys me that DoorDash doesn't/didn't let me set a preferred name so my deliveries ended up with a name I'm not familiar with.
Conclusion
So... yeah. Plenty of people violate the assumption that everyone has one name. I mean, even "normal" western people have nicknames. So if someone is complaining about preferred names I don't know what's wrong with them.