Also, I find it depressing when someone says that "x is not my friend" in a context where you don't have a reason to dislike x.
For me, friendship is an important relationship, and I like to think that I offer a bit more to my
friends than not disliking them. There are many people in the world I don't dislike, and I'm perfectly prepared to be polite to them or smile at them, but they are not friends; they are clients, coworkers, acquaintances, my dentist, random people I meet on railway platforms and so on. Friends are people I care a lot about, and applying the word "friend" to
anyone I don't dislike feels to me like devaluing friendship.
So Akima, do you expect people to call you just by your surname, or do you wish them to add "Ms." in front of it.
What I
expect is that people will use my "first name", and I accept that as customary in Australia. I would
prefer Ms. <surname> in the workplace, but that is a lost cause here. I don't have any problem with being addressed simply by my unadorned surname either, but that is not common in Australia, especially for women, at least in civilian life.
This may be difficult for us "occidentals" to understand. I hope that your coworkers understand and respect your reasons.
They don't have to. At work, and in the "outer world" generally, I go by my "Australian name" given in Western name-order (first name, surname), and co-workers address me by my "Australian" first name. I keep any discomfort to myself; it's part of fitting in my adopted country. As you have observed, it is very common for Chinese-descended people to use a Western first name if they live in Western countries. If they were born in a Western country, their family might well have given them a Western name at birth. Many will be Christian, and will probably have been baptised with a "Christian name". Hong Kong is sort of "between worlds", but there too, the influence of missionaries, British imperialism, and Western influence generally, means that many people use a Western first name, at least to interact with Westerners. This is all much less so in "Mainland" China.
In China, your surname always comes first. Mao Zedong's surname was Mao; his personal name was Zedong. Chinese people do not "not disclose" their personal names, as you put it. The point is that using the personal name
by itself is restricted to close friends. Anyone else would either use your full name (surname and personal name together), or your surname and title (with the title coming
after the name remember) or possibly just your surname. What bothers me is when people I barely know from a crack in the pavement seem to arrogate to themselves the status of a friend. As I said above, it feels fake, intrusive and manipulative.
Being born in China, I was not given a Western name at birth. I was named in the traditional way, inheriting my family surname from my father, and having my personal name selected by my
grandparents. When we moved to Australia, my family obviously had to adopt Western name order, romanized spelling for our names, and English-language "first names". In my case, the two syllables of my Chinese personal name each sound like a common English girl's name, so the school where I was first enrolled wrote them down separately as my first and
middle names using English spelling, and that is how I got my Australian name. I'm OK with it, and I made it "official" when I became an Australian citizen.
Plus there are cultures (Akima, is this the case in China?) where using aunt or uncle is a sign of respect.
Yes this is true in China. You would not do it to your boss at work normally, but an older person (generally a generation older) you meet regularly on polite terms might be addressed in this manner once you knew them fairly well. Grandfather and Grandmother are both also terms of respect for addressing unrelated elderly people whose names you do not know.
"No worries!" is the usual form here, for accepting an apology or assuring someone that no apology is necessary.