I am not one to follow celebrity gossip, but the recent decision by several of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children to drop their father’s surname caught my attention. Following the couple’s bitter separation, some of their children have chosen to remove “Pitt” from their original hyphenated surname, “Jolie-Pitt”. For people living in imperial China, changing one’s surname was rarely a casual decision. Unlike Europeans and many others, married Chinese women traditionally retain their own...