i did have to go back to immigration and get a residency certificate with the corrected name, but at least I was in and out in 15 minutes. So I'm finally on the last step: get my new passport on Friday. Just in time to head back to the US on Saturday.

While I get treating the two variants as different, especially in these digital times—I suspect a Unicode CJK variant-insensitive comparison is difficult, maybe impossible to properly do—it seems like some flexibility should be allowed for a difference like this which doesn't really matter. There's no technical restriction in their computer system that requires the residency certificate name match the household registration name. When I went to register, the clerk needed to manually re-type the info from the residency cert into the household registration system, and she actually didn't notice that my name was the simplified variant. She typed the traditional one and printed out a new household registration record, basically completing the process, but then someone else who was reviewing it spotted the difference and they spent over an hour figuring out how to undo my registration and completely remove me from the system.

So I don't know why/how my dad got the simplified version on his passport, but it's messing things up :( Seems like when issuing his passport, they could/should have checked it against his household registration record to make sure it had the same name.

Then the next step was to apply for a permanent resident certificate, which I just got today; it shows 黄 as my surname. Then I need to actually register myself in a household—this is where I ran into a problem. My dad's surname (and the rest of my family's) in the household registration records is the expected traditional 黃. While it seemed like they'd let me register with a different surname, they couldn't register me with 黄, as it's not in the dictionary they use for acceptable characters in names. And they didn't think that they could just change it to the 黃 variant, since it wouldn't match what's on my residency certificate. They're gonna call the immigration agency (which is who issued the residency cert) and see what they say, but it sounds like I'll need to ask immigration to amend and re-issue the cert with 黃 as my name.