About

My name’s Jia-Shen Boon. I’m currently living in Tokyo, Japan, working at Amazon as a software engineer in Search. I spent several years at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle with the Customer Q&A team, and was also once a research engineer in the Defence Science Organization in Singapore, working on Projects That Cannot Be Named.

I did my Master’s in Computer Science in the beautifully frigid campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my Bachelor of Engineering in the National University of Singapore. Sometimes I miss those cold winter days in Wisconsin, though I suspect that’s just the nostalgia speaking.

This blog is meant to be an avenue for me to improve my writing skills, which I’m told is a critical tool for developing clarity of thought.

Infrequently asked questions

Q: Is it Boon Jia Shen or Jia Shen Boon? Your online profiles go by boonjiashen but you say you go by Jia-Shen Boon.

My given name (a.k.a first name) is “Jia Shen” while my family name (a.k.a last name) is “Boon”. In Singapore, as is common for people with Chinese names, I would then go by “Boon Jia Shen”. Apparently this naming order is known as Eastern order. Examples in famous people include Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore whose family name is Lee, and Yao Ming, former NBA player whose family name is Yao.

I spent a couple of years in the US, which follows the Western name order. That’s when I switched the order of my family and given names, especially in government and employment-related documents like my resume.

Q: OK, then is it “Jia-Shen” or “Jia Shen”?

Officially, it would be “Jia Shen”, without the hyphen.

There’s an overwhelming preponderance of single-word first names in the US, and when I wrote my full name as Jia Shen Boon, people would call me Jia instead of Jia Shen, since they’d understand it to mean that my first, middle and last names are “Jia”, “Shen”, and “Boon” respectively.

I then added the hyphen in “Jia-Shen” in the hopes that the naming-parsing procedure running in people’s brains would correctly return “Jia-Shen” as the first name rather than split it up into first name and middle name. That worked about 70% of the time.

Q: You just spent a full 17 minutes of my life explaining your name. Could you just tell me how you’d like to be addressed?

If you meet me in person or contact me online, just call me Boon. It’s pronounced just like the English word “boon”. That’s how I often introduce myself these days, to short circuit the not-entirely-necessary preamble about my name. Also, I understand that my given name can be difficult for non-Chinese to pronounce.

Q: Challenge accepted. How do you pronounce your name?

Google Translate actually does a pretty good job pronouncing 嘉绅. Click the speaker icon on that page for sound.

My full name pronounced in Chinese would be 文嘉绅.

Q: Wait. You said your family name is Boon, but Google Translate writes 文 phonetically as Wén. So is it Boon or Wen?

I’m told that Boon is the Hainanese pronunciation of 文 (wén). My family heritage apparently traces back to Hainan, China.

Q: Can I get a refund on the time I wasted on this page?

Nope.

Last updated: July 18, 2021