Names
I’m 5.
With my tiny fingers I dial the digits to call my Year 1 best friend’s house using our phone/fax machine (remember those?)
“Hi. It’s Suet Ying. Can I please talk to Scarlet?”
“Hi honey. Sure. Scarlet! It’s Suet Yang.”
“Aren’t you gonna correct them?” my brothers would later ask me. I think about my answer.
“No.”
Having your name constantly mispronounced is a unique feeling of shame. It makes me feel like I’m standing naked in front of a watching audience. I am somehow both visibly foreign and entirely invisible. Many people who know me might be surprised to know that my birth name isn’t Stephanie Chan. It’s 陈雪莹. I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t completely ashamed of this. When I was 11 I became Steph. Imagine the weight placed on a child who dreaded every time they had to utter their own name or hear it butchered and tossed around by another white person. I think I lost a small part of myself every time it happened.
…
“So, how do you pronounce it?”
“Um, well, Suet Ying but that’s, like, the English transliteration”
“Oh okay, how would you say it in Chinese then?”
“Uhhhh, 陈雪莹”
“Chan Suet Ying”
“Yeah, uh, kind of. Cantonese tones are pretty hard though”
“Chan Suet Ying??”
“Uhhhh…”
What am I meant to do here? Do I explain that Cantonese has nine different tones and is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn? Should I walk them through the six standard tones and then the three additional tones that are almost indistinguishable in pitch to a non-Cantonese speaker? Should I just confess that no matter how hard they try they won’t come even remotely close to saying it properly and that it’s really fine to just say it the English way and omg I wish they would stop saying it six thousand times in front of me right now how many times can I say ‘no not quite’ before it’s like super awkward why is English such a primitive language ok I’m tired now.
“Chan Suet-Ying?!”
“Yeah :)”
My Chinese flinches in the face of whiteness, it runs and hides and doesn’t want to be found.
When my husband and I first started dating, I did not realise how hard it would be for me to overcome my shame. Andrew discovering I could speak Canto was fun for him, but pretty traumatising for me. He could not understand why I was reluctant to speak it in front of him, why I would go into the other room when my mum called me. I couldn’t understand either. Why are these words that I’ve known my whole life, my first words I ever spoke, getting stuck in my throat threatening to choke me of all my air?
I feel like a tiny yellow buoy in a sea of white. I can’t swim and I have been trying to camouflage myself for as long as I’ve known how to, so why does my body refuse to sink?
It took years of us dating, lots of listening around my family’s loud Cantonese dining table, cute wordless waves and thumbs-ups exchanged with my Ah Ma, practising, fumbling, and embarrassing himself in front of my family trying to speak Canto as we all laugh at him to his face, and me walking in on him watching Cantonese speaking tutorials late at night for me to trust a white person like this. Now I sit in our lounge and, like a good Chinese, scream into my phone talking to my mum on WeChat.
…
When you have to fill out a legal document in front of a colleague:
“So is that your, like, real name?”
“Um, it’s my Chinese name, but yeah legally.”
“Oh okay.”
What is real? I was 陈雪莹 first. I am also Stephanie Chan. Call out either and my head will turn. When I am 陈雪莹 do I stop being Stephanie Chan? When I am Stephanie Chan does 陈雪莹 disappear into oblivion? I am real, I am both. Why won’t you let me be both?
When I was young I would dream of getting married so that I could legally change my first and last name to something in English (how fucked is that?). When people look at my name on paper, they’ll definitely think I’m white! No one will ever mispronounce it or think I’m different again, I thought. Suet Ying Chan will die a quick legal death and I shall be done with her forever.
Now I am an adult, I am married and often think about the name of our future family. I no longer wish to scratch my name out from the family tree. There are political, patriarchal, and logistical (oh, the logistics) stakes at play here, but mostly it is a personal one. Mostly, I do not wish for my childhood self to be right about how I should exist in the world.
One day I will have children of my own and they too will have names in Chinese. Usually, the last name would be inherited from the father, but Andrew has no such name to offer so our kids will have mine: 陈.
…
Growing up comes with a decent amount of perspective. Things have sharpened into focus and I think I might just love the Chinese way of looking at the world. I love the way Chinese names are structured: 陈雪莹. It says so much about who we are and who I am. I think of my favourite line from The Farewell: “You think one's life belongs to oneself. But that's the difference between the East and the West. In the East, a person's life is part of a whole. Family. Society.” My name ties me to a village in Southern China where generations of tūpuna named 陈 have lived and loved, where Ah Ma raised my dad and where Ah Yeh is buried. On my last visit to Sun Gai, we ascended the mountain to visit his grave. My dad told his dad that his grandkids were here to see him and we all said in unison, “Ah Yeh.” This is how Chinese families greet each other, not with a “hi” or a “ni hao” just a naming of who we are to each other. I’ve never met Ah Yeh, but we have the same name. We stood for some moments, we burned incense and the air was wildly hot. Chinese humidity is no joke and even with my trusty rice hat on, I almost fainted. The heat was foreign and unwelcoming, it was physically rejecting me, but I knew in my heart that I could never be a stranger in this place, under this maunga. My name will always bring me home.
~
Stephanie Chan 陈雪莹 is a theology graduate from Tāmaki Makaurau.