My wife is Singaporean and we've always just used her English first name and skipped the Chinese first name without any problems. However, for the first time ever, she had an issue when boarding a China Eastern flight in JFK and they noticed that her Chinese first name (as listed in her Singaporean passport) was missing. They eventually let her board "because she was returning to her home country", but not before they had objections. When boarding the return China Eastern flight from SIN-JFK, they again raised a problem with the exclusion of her Chinese first name, but let her board because they had already let her board in the outbound and it was a return flight.

Her name in her SG passport:
NAME:
TAY YU YAN, STELLA MARIE

We've always travelled under "STELLA MARIE TAY", but China Eastern wanted to see the "YU YAN".

We're still not 100% sure what to do in future, but we're presuming that we'll need to put in "YU YAN STELLA MARIE" for the first name and "TAY" for the last name. This issue is coming up as I want to book a krisflyer award flight for her on a Star Alliance partner carrier and I'm worried that they'll cause a fuss like on China Eastern. Her name under her Krisflyer plan is just STELLA MARIE TAY, so to change it to YU YAN STELLA MARIE TAY we'll need to submit a change of name form.