Say My Name Again When Youre Caught in the Middle
America, Say My Proper name
I tried Troy. I stuck with Viet.
Mr. Nguyen is a novelist and contributing opinion writer.
LOS ANGELES — What's your proper noun? Mine is Viet Thanh Nguyen, although I was built-in in Vietnam as Nguyen Thanh Viet. Whichever way you arrange my proper noun, it is not a typical American name. Growing up in the U.s.a., I was encouraged by generations of American tradition to believe that it was normal, desirable and applied to adopt an American first proper noun, and even to change ane's surname to an American one.
Of course, that raises the question — what exactly is an American name?
When my Vietnamese parents became American citizens, they took the pragmatic route and changed their names to Joseph and Linda. My adolescent cocky was shocked. Were these the aforementioned people who had told me, repeatedly, that I was "100 percent Vietnamese?"
They asked me if I wanted to change my name. There was expert reason for me to change my name, for throughout my babyhood my classmates had teased me past asking if my last proper noun was Nam. As in "Viet Nam." Get it? The autocorrect office on the iPhone certainly thinks so, equally I still sometimes get letters — from friends — addressed to Viet Nam.
I tried on diverse names. I did non want anything too typical, like my Cosmic baptismal name, Joseph. Or Joe. Or Joey. I wanted something but a little scrap different, like me. How about — Troy?
It didn't work. That name, or any of the other contenders, seemed alien to me. My parents' constant reminder that I was 100 per centum Vietnamese had worked its magic. I felt some kind of psychic connexion to Vietnam, the country where I was born but that I remembered not at all, having left at age 4. This psychic tie was ironic, considering my fellow Vietnamese refugees in San Jose, Calif., of the 1980s — who never called themselves Americans — would draw me as completely Americanized. A whitewash. A banana, yellow on the exterior, white on the inside.
If I were indeed a banana, many other Americans probably just saw the yellow part and not the soft whiteness inside. The dilemma of existence caught in between opposing cultures was inappreciably new and has not gone away, but information technology was still difficult for me and everyone else who has had to feel it.
I was hardly reassured when I went on a field trip to the Defense Linguistic communication Institute in Monterey and a pleasant young white American soldier, dressed in Vietnamese garb and fluent in Vietnamese, translated my Vietnamese proper name into a kind of American equivalent: Bruce Smith.
The Smith part was a practiced translation, as Nguyen is the about mutual Vietnamese surname, inherited from a imperial dynasty. In Australia, where many of the refugees went, Nguyen is amid the nearly common surnames. I wonder if the Australians take figured out how to pronounce my name in all of its tonal beauty. In the Us, most Vietnamese-Americans, tired of explaining, simply tell other Americans to say the name equally "Win," leading to many puns most win-win situations.
As for Bruce, I think George might take been more accurate. Viet is the name of the people, and George is the father of the country. Or maybe America itself should exist my showtime name, after Amerigo Vespucci, the cartographer whose outset name — Americus in Latin — has become a part of all our American identities.
Or possibly, instead of contorting myself through translation — which comes from the Latin word significant to "carry beyond," as my parents carried me across the Pacific — I should simply be Viet.
That, in the cease, was the choice I made. Not to modify. Non to translate. Not, in this i case, to suit to America. It was truthful that I was built-in in Vietnam but fabricated in America. Or remade. But even if I had already become an American by the fourth dimension I took my adjuration of citizenship, I refused to accept this pace of changing my name.
Instead, I knew intuitively what I would one day know explicitly: that I would make Americans say my proper noun. I felt, intuitively, that changing my proper name was a betrayal, as the act of translation itself carries within it the potential for betrayal, of getting things incorrect, deliberately or otherwise. A expose of my parents, even if they had left information technology open to me to alter my proper noun; a betrayal of being Vietnamese, even if many Vietnamese people were ambivalent almost me. A betrayal, ultimately, of me.
I return no judgment on people who change their names. We all brand and remake our own selves. But neither should at that place exist judgment on people who exercise non change their names, who insist on being themselves, even if their names induce dyslexia on the function of some Americans. My surname is consistently misspelled every bit Ngyuen or Nyugen — fifty-fifty in publications that publish me.
In Starbucks and other java shops, my first proper name is often misspelled by the barista as Biet or Diet. I have been tempted to adopt a Starbucks name, as my friend Thuy Vo Dang puts it, to make my life easier. Hers was Tina. Mine was Joe. I said it once to a barista and was instantly ashamed of myself.
Never did I do that again. I wanted everyone to hear the barista say my name. Publicly claiming a proper name is one small way to take what is private, what might be shameful or embarrassing, and change its meaning. We begin at some place like Starbucks, which is itself an unusual name, derived from a character in "Moby Dick," itself an unusual proper name. Starbucks and Moby Dick are a part of the American lexicon and mythology. So can all of our names, no matter their origins, exist a part of this land. All nosotros have to exercise is proudly and publicly assert them.
Recently I visited Phillips Exeter Academy, a once all-white institution founded in 1781 whose population is now most 20 per centum Asian. In front of the unabridged student body, a student described how he dreaded introducing himself when he was growing up and fabricated up nicknames for himself and then that he would not take to explain his name'due south pronunciation. He asked me what I would say to people struggling to concur on to their names.
"What'due south your proper name?" I asked.
"Yaseen," he said.
I told him that his name was cute, that his parents gave information technology to him out of dearest. I told him near the name I gave my son, Ellison, whom I named after the novelist Ralph Waldo Ellison, who was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. I claimed for my son an American genealogy that was too an African-American genealogy that, through me and my son, would likewise be a Vietnamese-American genealogy. Ellison Nguyen, a name that compressed all of our painful, aspirational history as a land.
America, too, is a proper name. A name that citizens and residents of the United states of america have taken for themselves, a proper name that is mythical or maligned effectually the world, a proper noun that causes endless frustration for all those other Americans, from N to Southward, from Canada to Chile, who are not a part of the United States. A complicated proper name, as all names are, if we trace them back far enough.
Yaseen. Ellison. Viet. Nguyen. All American names, if we want them to be. All of them a reminder that we change these United States of America one name at a fourth dimension.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, nearly recently, of "The Refugees" and the editor of "The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives." He teaches English at the Academy of Southern California.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/immigrants-refugees-names-nguyen.html
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