What's in a Name?

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" says the enamored Romeo.

Samuel Coleridge Taylor expressed a similar sentiment:

Ah! replied my gentle fair,

Beloved, what are names but air?

Choose thou, whatever suits the line:

Call me Sappho, cal me Chloris,

Call me Lalage, or Doris,

Only, only call me thine.

But these were supremely confident lovers, secure in what they had. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, her character expresses something quite different. When Beloved comes to lie down with Paul D, she cries, "And you have to call me my name....Call my name...Please call it."

If you are alone, or unrecognized, or searching for an identity in a foreign environment, the assurance of having a name, your own name, can be important.

At Adroit College, we are required to use Korean names. If we're not Korean, the teacher makes up a name for us.

The Korean name I was given at Adroit College is 민백영, pronounced something like Min Baek Yeong. I have been called by that name for the past 2 years that I have been taking classes there.

In Korea, though, the name I went by was 마가넷, or Ma Ga Let. No one suggested I should go by any other name. That was fine with me.

Perhaps I'm lucky that I have a name that exists - and/or sounds good (to me at least) - in other languages. Living in France and Zaire I went by Marguerite or Maguy, and Margarita in Guatemala. When I hear one of these versions of Margaret, including the Korean MaGaLet, it still sounds like my name, like me. When I hear Min Baek Young, it sounds like someone else.

I understand the teacher's thinking - if we have a Korean name, we will feel more "Korean," we will immerse into the culture more, we will get used to Korean names, and so on. But I don't think it works. I think it backfires. It adds an additional tension, an additional insecurity, to a situation that is already difficult and tense.

I think now about the names of our students, and how some of them have taken the step to adopt an American name, and what it might have cost them to do so. I think of others who have no wish at all to adopt an American name, and I sympathize with them.

I also recognize something new. Sometimes, when I, as a teacher, would ask students their name, they would pronounce it in the "American" way, using English sounds. This would confuse me, or irritate me, because I wanted to try to pronounce their name "correctly." But now I see that maybe the pronunciation of their name using English sounds IS their American name, the name they want to use here - an American twist on what still remains their own name, a comfortable way to bridge the gap between the two cultures and languages.