Fresh Off the Boat – “Hi, My Name Is…”
YES
Why Uzo Aduba wouldn’t change her name:
My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is
Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is
Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and
hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my
last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody
ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I
could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian
accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without
missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and
Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”They can learn
I’ve worked with many exchange programs on campuses, and they still “encourage” Chinese students to choose English names for their stay in the US. I’ve adopted a rule for myself, I won’t address them with their English name until they’ve told me to stop trying their real name on at least three different occasions. My family is largely immigrant, and while we’ve never had this problem, I don’t think anyone should have to change who they are when them find a new home, even a temporary one. So far, only two exchange student actually wanted to keep their English name, and one of them, Alice, had had Alice for a nickname since she was little.
Don’t know if it’s okay to add this here, but I used to work with a Chinese woman who had changed her name to Angelina for the sake of ease. When she first told me that was what she’d had to do, I asked her for her real name and if she minded me calling her that. She looked so frikkin happy, and it only took about two minutes for me to say it right. It’s not that people can’t pronounce these names, it’s that they won’t. It’s lazy and it’s rude.
It’s also RACIST.
Say ‘racist’.
They pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger just fine.
They can’t, actually, pronounce Tchaikovsky, or Rachmaninov, or Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky, or Vesel’nitskaya just fine. Probably not even Schwarzenegger.
The hill to die on is the fact that it’s better to make a fucking effort, even if you butcher the name. At that point, it is up to the person you’re talking to decide if it’s something they want to hear.
It is racist, it is disrespectful. But not because they pronounce Russian, or Austrian, or any other European-origin names correctly—only because they do it with that bald-faced confidence, and a dash of that lovely certainty that they have to, anyway.
It’s really hard, sometimes, not to think that they just don’t care either way what it sounds like, but like I said, that part is already up to me to deal with.Yeah no, English-speaking people absolutely don’t pronounce Schwarzenegger right. Or my German name. But they should try, and the same goes for any other unfamiliar name, be it Nigerian, Chinese or from wherever else. As the poster before me said, it’s about making the effort to get the name right rather than avoiding it out of convenience – and that ‘just not making the effort’ can be racist.
(Btw., my nieces and nephews have Igbo names like Uzo Aduba. They’re not actually hard to pronounce if you ask how it’s done and take five minutes to practice. And even so they’d much rather for someone to pronounce their name a bit weirdly because they can’t do it better instead of avoiding their names completely yor even calling them by others.)
Someone I knew in college made this her Date-a-White-Boy litmus test. Because, “If he can’t flex his tongue round your name, he won’t flex it right round your clit.”
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