How my last name came to be.

Last Names.

They’re one of those things that most people are just born with and never think about again.
But me being incredibly melodramatic, I had to.

Here’s the story.

I was 15 years old, my confirmation year. As any good Catholic boy would do, I thought long and hard about who I wanted my confirmation Saint to be.

No, I didn’t.

For many kids here, getting a confirmation name often meant nothing more than being able to use your fancy new name on social media. After all, with Asian surnames, chances are that you share the same last name as 7 other kids in the room. So why go by John Lee or Dick Tan when you could go by “John Augustine” or “Dick Timothy”?

Perhaps that was just me. But no, I swear this is an actual phenomenon. I’d do a survey to prove it if I had to.

Anyway, back to business.

My middle name being Xavier, I narrowed my shallow choices down to Francis (Like Francis Xavier) and Charles (Charles Xavier from Xmen). I know, very mature.

But of course, being a good Catholic boy, I did of course do my research into St. Charles Borromeo.

Okay, not really. But what did stand out to me what this.

St. Charles Borromeo was someone who used his position for good.
And as a young boy with big dreams, that was exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
If you knew the 14 year old me, I wanted to be some sort of Catholic pop star who would use my influence to get my raving fans to convert to Catholicism.

Hey, don’t judge. I’m sure you had phases too.
At least mine was somewhat noble.

And so, I was confirmed as Gabriel Xavier Charles.
Like my name wasn’t already long enough for a Singaporean Chinese.

Now, unlike the other kids who gradually started flexing their fancy new confirmation names on their social media, me being me, took it a step further. I’m sure you can guess what came next.

I had never liked my birth last name, “Ng’. For several reasons that are just as unnecessarily dramatic and convoluted as this story.

One of them being the fact that my father left when I was a lot younger, and I thought it was a good excuse to just go all out and get my name legally changed.
Of course, I also thought it was cool to have a white last name.

If you’ve seen the mini-documentary I made about this on my Youtube channel, you’d understand why I wanted to do this.
(I was immature and couldn’t separate my Asian heritage from the pagan/collectivist ideas associated with it and wanted to be more Westernised and Catholic and individualistic and have a different last name from 60 people on my block)

Though I’ve grown a lot since then, I can definitely say that I had no regrets adopting a new name.

Without a father figure at a point of time in my life when I needed one most, making this decision was something that gave me the chance to start afresh and figure out for myself what kind of man I wanted to be. It allowed me to find my identity in Christ, as a child of God, without the burden of feeling like I was tied to a certain set of values or ideas based on the colour of my skin or the country I was from.

And if that sounds completely ridiculous, it is.
I was a messed up (still am) kid who needed that tangible feeling of starting anew.
A real gen-z special snowflake I am.

I’d been “Mr. Charles” for several years now, and Gabriel X. Charles always sounded cool.
Problem is, people like to leave out the X. And it bothered me for some reason.
Perhaps because I’m attached to the way my mother used to write my name like that as a kid.
But more likely because I felt like an imposter with such a white last name.

I promise this isn’t the whole story. But given my track record, such an assumption would be understandable.

“Joining us today we have Gabriel Charles” *cringe*

My friend Amber once asked me if I was a revert to Catholicism, and I told her I wasn’t.
But lately, I’ve realised that, I really am.

From a young age, I always identified as a “Good Catholic Boy”. But the truth is, I had never gone beyond the surface-level Catholicism I was raised with. Heck, the fact that I used my confirmation name as a remedy for my internalised identity issues should say enough. I told myself it was because I was proud to be Catholic. Heck, I didn’t even know why I was Catholic. It took encountering American Protestants for me to really dig into it myself.

I will say that, perhaps a blind, childlike faith as I had, is indeed enough for some people. The pious little old ladies at the front pew praying their rosaries who were never taught to read for instance. But a roughed-up soul like mine, needed something more. And while the past few months have been an amazing journey, I have only started to scratch the surface of understanding what it is to truly live for Christ and take up my cross.

Hence, it was only after my Marian Consecration earlier this year that I decided to do some long overdue research.

St. Charles Borromeo.
“Born October 2nd. He was the son of an aristocratic family.”
Something I had always tried to portray myself, in an attempt to make up for a broken family background.

“At the age of 12, all he wanted was to dedicate himself to a life of service to the Church.”
12 year old me wanted to be a Catholic Youtube star, but close enough.

“He had a speech impediment that made him appear slow to those who did not know him.
Despite this challenge, he performed well and impressed his teachers.”
I couldn’t talk until I was 19. True story. Teachers never liked me though.

“His father passed away and although Charles was a teenager, responsibility for his household fell to him. His responsibility for his household resulted in financial difficulties, and Charles earned a reputation for being short of funds.”
As the oldest son, this is relatable.

But perhaps it was the rest of his story that made me realise that St. Charles Borromeo really is my hero. And perhaps after this, he will be yours too.

“Despite his hardships, he rose up through the ranks of the Church and attained a high position in the Vatican, where he promoted learning and established a literary academy. He later became Archbishop of Milan.

Borromeo developed a reputation as a young, idealistic reformer in Rome. The driving out of corruption was a critical matter during Borromeo’s time. The Protestant Reformation was spreading throughout northern Europe and constantly threatened to move south. The greatest defence against Protestant doctrinal errors and claims against the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was reform and the restoration of integrity to the Catholic Church. Archbishop Borromeo saw this clearly and he made this his mission. His strategy was to provide education to many clergy he saw as ignorant. He founded schools and seminaries and colleges for clergy.

He also ended the selling of indulgences, a form of simony, and ordered monasteries to reform themselves. His work of cleaning up the Church also made him enemies. On one occasion a member of a small, decrepit order known as the “Humiliati” attempted to assassinate him with a pistol, but missed.

In 1576 a famine struck Milan followed by the plague, and many of the wealthy and powerful fled the city. Archbishop Borromeo remained. He used his own fortune to feed the starving people. When that money was spent, he took loans and went deep into debt. He may have fed 70,000 people per day.”

During a confession earlier this year, my priest had given me instruction to find a patron saint that I wanted to emulate. Being insufferable as I am, I thought I would never be able to find a patron Saint I could relate to. Perhaps my slight sheepishness for the way I chose my confirmation name led me to neglect the Saint whom I had literally taken the name of. But after that years overdue research, I finally found the man who had been right under my nose all along.
Speaking of which, the man sure had one big nose.

My spiritual father. A true reformer of the Church. A man of action. I realised that indeed, St. Charles Borromeo was the role model I was searching for.

I always had difficulty relating to Saints whose stories revolved around mainly their devout prayer life. While they inspired me deeply, it wasn’t on that sort of personal level that I was looking for in a patron Saint. On the other hand, I couldn’t relate to Saints like St. Augustine either. While I have my struggles, I can’t say that I can relate to his former life of debauchery either, as tragic as I like to imagine my backstory to be sometimes.

When it came to St. Charles Borromeo, he lived a life I wanted to emulate. Even if not on his scale, in the little ways that God has given me the opportunity. No crazy conversion story. Just a “good Catholic boy” who wanted to serve God, and did so in great ways.

The communion of Saints is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? In his interview with Lauren Chen, Milo Yiannopoulous put it in a way that immediately made sense to me. “If you’re a Christian, they’re your… celebrities, but virtuous ones, ones whose lives you can be fascinated by, investigate, think about, ponder over, kind of get to know them even though you don’t really know them.”

I don’t know how to explain it, but that moment brought me a clarity that I had not experienced in a long time.

And the very next day I called up my lawyer and told her that I wanted to make a change to my name. Again.

So there we had it. Gabriel St-Charles.
A tangible reminder of who exactly it was that I desired to emulate, and a family name to bring shame upon should I become a degenerate.
(As well as a syllable to fill the empty space left by people leaving out my middle name initial. I still have no idea why that bothered me so much.)

And I was at peace.

But seriously though, if you asked me what difference adding a “St” to my last name actually made, I really wouldn’t know what to tell you. It’s funny how my solution to not wanting to seem pretentious was to do something even more pretentious. But I guess that’s how I’ve always been, and this isn’t even the full story of my name change debacle. At this rate, I’ve probably had more name changes than I’ve had girlfriends. (People from different stages of my life literally know me by different names.)

Am I an undercover agent, or just a kid with identity issues?

While the former is a cooler story to tell myself, accepting the latter is something I’ve started to work on as I move on to the next phase of my life.
Truth is, in my desperate desire to not be a victim of my circumstances, I’ve been in denial about my “daddy issues” for over a decade now.
My teenage years may have been lacking in terms of father figures, but it’s never too late to find a spiritual one to guide you towards your heavenly one.

St. Charles Borromeo, patron saint of learning, the arts, catechists, and clergy, righteous reformer, bringer of lapsed Catholics back into the Church, ora pro nobis.

Sources: https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=212

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