Say My Names, Say My Names

 I remember exactly when I became Emily- or rather, when I gave myself the name. 

Just before I began my first week of kindergarten, my parents sat my sister and me down at the dinner table. Handing us a stapled stack of papers titled "Top Most Popular Names of 2010", they told us to circle our top favorites, and that we would narrow it down from there. My sister chose her name easily, but I long mulled over ‘Sophia’, ‘Sasha’, and ‘Emily’. Maybe if I didn’t already know girls at my church with the same name, I would be Sophia or Sasha now. At any rate, I chose Emily.

really outing myself here (if I see this picture circulating...) but in hindsight, why did my parents think it was a good idea to let this girl choose her own name

Emily was not my legal name, technically only a nickname; preemptively correcting teachers that “you can just call me Emily” after miserable attempts at pronouncing my Korean name, Ah-Hyun, became a quintessential experience of childhood.

I was granted American citizenship in the spring of this year, and in the process legally changed my first name to Emily and my Korean name to now be my middle name. I actually had to attend public Zoom court for this- and thought it was funny that I had to sit through numerous other cases of name changes, as I slowly realized that I was the only cisgender person changing my name for a far more trivial reason comparative to all else who was there. 

I remember telling Mrs. Valentino afterward, and her response being a screeching "NOOOOOO WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT". I laughed; why was she being so dramatic over something I myself didn’t dwell over for long? 

Not long after, I began to understand. As part of the language unit in 11AP, I read “The F Word”, an excerpt from Firoozeh Dumas’s memoir. An excerpt from the excerpt goes like this:

I wanted to be a kid with a name that didn’t draw so much attention, a name that didn’t come with a built-in inquisition as to when and why I had moved to America and how was it that I spoke English without an accent and was I planning on going back and what did I think of America?

Though it was Dumas's self-reflection of assimilating into having an “American” name, and then surrendering it to reclaim her name "Firoozeh", I knew it was also a semi-narration of my own lived experience of anglicization. It was an uncomfortable realization to make, as unlike Dumas, I'm still actively choosing the name Emily, really only to make the lives of others around me simpler. But is it really simpler? I mean, if you can pronounce names like Cillian Murphy and Saoirse Ronan, certainly you can make the space and time to learn Ah-Hyun, too? (if you're interested to hear more related to this point, watch this Patriot Act Deep Cut interview with Hasan Minhaj that I really resonated with, starting from 15:20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYShB-DzYO8)

I'm writing this blog as an exercise of storytelling to where I've gotten today, not to directly answer the Notre Dame prompt (and definitely not a manifesto that I will no longer be responding to Emily). I'm still searching for the meanings of my name(s) and how they shape my actual selfhood. To be blunt, I don't feel so emotionally attached to either one of my names, Emily or Ah-Hyun. Is that such a horrible thing? Surely it isn't... Lately, I've begun to think about life after high school, and the possibility of "reclaiming" the name given to me by my parents, the name of my heritage and culture. What if I reinvent myself in college, pretending to new friends that I've never been called anything other than Ah-Hyun? But then I'd have to change my legal name back! What a headache.