I Hate My Name

An essay about four letters

My whole life, there has always been a very clear, defined line which cuts through the pool of people I’m close to. There is no grey area in this, and there is no blurring; there is only a clean white line slicing my circle of friends and family in two. It’s not this line which occupies so much of my thought though, but a symptom of the line. It’s a by-product of the separation�"a divergent evolution which cordons the two species from each other. That symptom is my name.

            The origin of my name is Vietnamese. It means “gentle, meek, and timid as a lamb”, which is a definition found in the Vietnamese/English dictionary that my family has placed around me like fencing. The pronunciation of it is the short but grating creation of two omitted accents to which the English language has no equivalent. Also, the ‘n’ isn’t pronounced like it is in English and there’s nothing in English to compare it to. Put together, it all sounds like one syllable with a downward slide in pitch to make it sound as condescending as it can be. Finally�"the cherry on top�"nobody outside of Vietnamese origin has ever been able to say it. Instead, the first teacher my parents ever handed me to for school gave it a French/English pronunciation. The ‘n’ was turned into its English sound and the ‘ie’ was said how the French say it in the word ‘chien’ or ‘mien’ so that it could be pronounced more easily by anglophones. I think that’s a good representation of the challenges a child of immigrant parents faces when he goes to elementary school in a Western country and then walks ten minutes home to an entirely separate society with vastly different values and expectations.

            Someone who hasn’t experienced this sort of personal bifurcation might think an immigrant child just adopts different rituals and languages when switching from family to friends. It could be viewed as the development of a school/home mode, which every kid engineers at some point. To an extent, that’s accurate, but is only the visual component of a much larger and dominantly internal conflict. Unlike the abundant perceptible differences, there are only four or five fundamental disagreements which Western and Eastern society have in morality. For a child still learning who to be though, that’s more than enough to shatter the world. With too little personal experience to draw from and too much world to sufficiently study, the only way for a six-year-old to learn right and wrong is by asking adults. Everything around you says that both parents and teachers know the truth. They know everything, after all. A little kid just doesn’t suspect the meaning of a good person changes in the time it takes to walk from school back home.

That was the worst part. There was whiplash when I praised and rewarded for doing something, but then told to stand in the corner and cross my arms for even mentioning it not even a few blocks away. My neck will ache for the rest of my life, and once the sharpness of the pain faded away, it left only perpetual dread. I knew I had done something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what.

In my case, my parents would tell me to be kind and gentle, make others like me, and be a useful, normal part of society. Everyone else in the world wanted me to dream my dreams and follow them despite cynics saying not to, rise above the rest, and be extraordinary. Maybe it was my aptitude for drawing and creative writing, or how the kids I was supposed to like were too loud for me, or the way things at school were structured into competitions that I liked winning, but eventually I started veering away from what my parents wanted for me.

That meant I was punished for it. I hadn’t been aware that my parents’ definition of their son was so intricate, but they made certain I knew in the coming years. Their son was a perfect, servile vessel for the family’s bloodline, and with that came honour. Everything was supposed to serve my family, but school had tempted me to serve myself every once in a while. That made me a disappointment. Anything that wasn’t normal enough for my parents’ household was fought with scolding, disappointment, confiscation of whatever was too weird to be mine�"the stripping away of anything that wasn’t their son. I was punished, and the name which was screamed at me during those punishments was Vietnamese.

            But I was praised at school. I had a steady hand for drawing, and my friends crowded around my sketches of dragons and heroes and animals and outer space. I had the highest marks in the class, which meant teachers gave me a special seat at the front of the room and a paper star to wear on my chest which I coloured myself. Writing was great too. It was a nerdy, bookish hobby that I was made fun of for, but making my own characters and stories was like living in a world I controlled, with levers I could press for more fun times. At school, nobody’s happiness mattered except for mine, and it suited me. Every time I was told I was doing a good job, it was done using my English name.

            As time went on, it was just expected that I’d be chastised in my Vietnamese name and praised in my English name. Whenever I’d hear those foreign sounds, I’d just expect to have my happiness talked down on and taken away, but it would alright again once I could identify with my English name. It took school to make me realize how exhausting my parents’ teachings were. Without the expectations of Vietnamese culture staring over my shoulder at everything, I was sitting up straighter and wandering more than walking, and my legs needed that break. It always takes the taste of something else to realize your meal has gone bad, and you don’t go back once you’ve had something sweeter. I started growing this need to keep my home life and my school life distant from each other so that one would not contaminate the other. This was something that became known, and once my friends knew about my feelings, they started picking which name to call me based on how they wanted me to react.

That wasn’t everybody since most people didn’t know how to accurately create the quirks of Vietnamese language. Occasionally though, I’d meet somebody who knew how to speak Vietnamese, and they�"recognizing the spelling of my name even without the accents�"would use my Vietnamese name thinking it was a nice way to introduce a common ground for us to bond over. Each time, I would make sure they knew in the bluntest of terms how I felt about that name. Then, knowing that, they’d either use my Vietnamese name or my English name depending on how much they cared about whether I was comfortable and happy. There were accidental slips from those who predominantly spoke Vietnamese, but at that age, there were also many who were malicious for the sake of it. We were kids, after all.

Because of the distinction, I suddenly had a method of knowing right away how certain people thought of me, and I didn’t want it. It seemed so needlessly negative, but that information was inescapable with my name. That fact was forced into me so much, into my throat and up into my head that soon, it was an expectation, and then a convenience. The moment I grew socially conscious enough to make friends, I already knew who wanted me to be happy and who didn’t care. My name was becoming not just a way for me to differentiate who I was talking to, but also how I felt about whoever was saying it.

            We got older, and teasing turned into tormenting. It was the nature of middle school kids to pry into whatever it is you feel strongly about�"whether you were extremely proud or extremely ashamed�"and then use it for their fun. Not everyone, but most of the kids at school would bring up my name over and over again, knowing how it would make me feel and sacrificing that because they could afford not being liked by a shy, quiet kid they barely knew. I was called ‘Hyena’ a lot, partially because of the first letter and vowel sound, but also because of the way I laughed. There was also ‘Heinz’ because my name was often and intentionally misspelled as ‘Hein’, and by extension, ‘Heinz Doofenshmirtz’. Everyone was laughing at that. If it was anybody else’s name, I honestly would have found it funny at least to begin with. But every time somebody made a comment about me, I would need to clasp my hands over my ears to keep a strange boiling feeling inside my chest. How dare they say what they didn’t know made me angry? That of course just made it worse, and the jokes started pouring down. I’d be pelted with the splatter whenever I decided to walk across the wrong people, and it went on and on and on.

I’m very aware I shouldn’t have been that angry. They were only the kind of snide, immature things you’d expect from children like them, but my English name didn’t deserve that. The name which had given me so much comfort and reassurance when I needed it was being attacked, and I had an urge much too strong to defend it.

            With that age came my first personal realizations of what is right and what is wrong. By that time, my morals were still adolescent, but through all my experiences with other people, I knew who I wanted to be. And the more my parents realized that and tried to reel me back in, the harder I fought them. According to them, I was still their son, and all the minute intricacies in their definition of me were all coming to light at once. Their son was Buddhist and had nothing but faith in the word of religion. Their son loved women, only women, and wouldn’t associate with anyone who could be called homosexual. Their son loved masculine attractions such as sports, cars, and going out with friends. Their son looked, acted, and spoke like a proper gentleman. Their son was a boy. And after they told me all that, I was only left extremely confused why they kept calling me the name of their son when he sounded nothing like me. In fact, he sounded a lot like someone I disagree with in plenty of ways. He sounded like someone who would detest me and fight with me constantly. Whoever their son was, I wanted to stay as far away from him at all times as possible. In fact, I didn’t even want to hear his name.

I got older and older, and my English name stuck with me through it all, dangling from my neck like a charm. With my English name, there grew pride from both the habit of defending it and the security I gained from having it knowingly used as a term of affection by the friends closest to me. With my Vietnamese name, there was only this need to keep it quarantined within my family. I locked it inside my house and trapped it in a cultural pocket of the city. When I was out in the real world, slowly discovering who I was and adorning myself with everything I picked up, the appearance of my parents’ son vanished bit by bit. I was being raised by the environment I put myself in, and that environment had a vastly different vision than my parents. I picked up scars and new clothes and made myself unrecognizable with makeup, and if my family saw me, they wouldn’t believe I was related to them. Their son was only the faintest of memories when I was at school, so why should his name stay?

On the road to where I want to be, I’m currently travelling through a transitory survival zone. It freezes over at night and it’s difficult to keep warm, but there’s plenty of time for me to explore the lush springs and greenery during the day. My Vietnamese name is the warning signal which alerts me to zip up the coat the weather forced me to buy. My English name tells me it’s safe to take it off so my makeup doesn’t smear and my jewelry stops poking me. The person I am isn’t perfect, obviously. He’s trying to be, though. At the least, he’s certainly preferable to who my family wanted me to be. And a very big part of that is the slow process of using my Vietnamese name less and my English name more. I’m growing older and spending less time at home, and my time as myself grows every day. One day it’ll transform into something else entirely, I’ll never have to hear my Vietnamese name ever again.

Finally, I want to take time to discuss another piece of writing I’ve done. Creative writing never stopped being my favourite pastime. I wrote books all throughout my life. In the eleventh grade, I wrote a long story about a character named Olivia Lovell. Olivia was very unlike me in a lot of different ways. She suffered very little from the thoughts of others and was much more intelligent than I am, but she was also much more irrational and susceptible to the manipulations of others. However, she loved writing, makeup, and dressing up, and was never afraid to speak her mind. I’ve written many characters based on different aspects of myself, who I was, or who I’m expected to be, but Olivia was the first character I remember creating who concretely represented the person I wish I were. And she had a really pretty name.