naming names

In light of the movement with #GoldOpen to draw attention to people of color in Hollywood with the opening of Crazy Rich Asians, Kelly Marie Tran, a Vietnamese actress who had a leading role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, wrote an oped today in the NY Times regarding online abusers and racial discrimination that resulted in her deleting her Instagram.

I am not the first person to have grown up this way. This is what it is to grow up as a person of color in a white-dominated world. This is what it is to be a woman in a society that has taught its daughters that we are worthy of love only if we are deemed attractive by its sons. This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind. 

I want to live in a world where children of color don’t spend their entire adolescence wishing to be white. I want to live in a world where women are not subjected to scrutiny for their appearance, or their actions, or their general existence. I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are seen as what they have always been: human beings... 

You might know me as Kelly. 

I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a “Star Wars” movie. 

I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. 

My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.

~ Loan (Kelly Marie) Tran 

People often ask me when I introduce myself why I did not take an American name. In high school French class, I had picked the name Anne-Marie. I had thought long and hard when applying for university whether it would be a good time to go by a name that was easier to pronounce and/or remember. I even filled out two versions of a college application with Anne-Marie on one. In my 20s, I sometimes introduced the world to Bambi (core values and full circle (part 8)) but she was more of a nightlife persona.

Although I kept my birth name for personal, university, career, etc., I did Americanize it. When we first came to the U.S., my parents in their FOB accents somehow butchered the pronunciation of my name to be 'Chong'. People from the church that sponsored us and in elementary school would refer to me as such. Of course, my parents had no foresight that 'Chong' would be a basis for childhood bullying. As one can imagine, it became fodder for the derogatory slang 'Ching Chong', which many had posted on Tran's social media accounts. On the first day of second grade when my new teacher was trying to pronounce my name, I decided to change the course of my name and said it phonetically before any of my classmates can chime in with 'Chong'.

There have been two important men in my life who refuse to call me by any other name than the true Vietnamese pronunciation of my name which is neither 'Chong' nor the phonetic version I go by now. Both happen to be white American men. One (moments that matter (part 4)) lived in Vietnam for a few years and learned the language, and the other (bubble of bliss) has lived in Asia for most of his adult life. When I first moved to Vietnam, I will admit that it took me some time to recognize when people were calling my name. As I introduced myself, it was automatic to go by the phonetic pronunciation although I was living in the country that would know the correct way to say my name. 

One of those men was baffled why I allowed people to call me by any other name than the one given to me. Even in mixed crowds, he stubbornly insists on calling me by my true name despite the looks of confusion by others who do not understand that it is my name he is using. Despite my initial embarrassment when he would do this, he is right and in hindsight, was teaching me a valuable lesson on authenticity. It really is not difficult for people to pronounce the 'tr' as 'j' or 'ch', and if a Vietnamese person can learn to say 'Kelly', an American person should be able to learn to say 'Loan'.