For my high school graduation, the presenter read every single person’s name out loud. During rehearsals, they invited people to correct any pronunciation of names in preparation for the actual ceremony. I ignored their announcements, spacing out in boredom and wishing they would finish faster so I could stop sweating in the sun-bleached rows of chairs. As we were packing up to leave, my AP Economics teacher, who was supervising graduation practice, asked me, “You’re not going to correct them about your name?”
I was confused. What correction was there to make? April Wang: a month of the year and one of the most common Chinese last names. There was no way for them to mess it up. It only hit me then that he was referring to the pronunciation of my last name. Everyone always pronounced it as W-AY-ng. I knew it wasn’t the right pronunciation; it should be pronounced 'W-AH-ng.' However, it was always confusing when I corrected them, and people would give a second glance to whatever attendance sheet or nametag they had started with. So, at some point in my life, I decided it was easier to say and respond to 'W-AY-ng' then have to spell out my name awkwardly and explain that “actually, it is spelled correctly, it’s just pronounced the same way as Wong with an o, that one’s the Cantonese spelling, and I barely speak Mandarin, let alone Cantonese.” And it had become so ingrained that I didn’t even notice the mispronunciation in front of hundreds of people.
It was then that I was hit with a strange sort of grief. I should be proud of my culture. I am proud. But it’s genuinely not a big deal. I’m not in denial, because if I were, I would be trying to hide more than just my name. I would feel a difference between hearing ‘W-AY-ng’ and hearing ‘W-AH-ng.’ I couldn’t even care enough to correct it at my graduation. When did that happen? A name is a home––a memory of the sticky-sweet tang-yuan my parents would make for me, the silly Chinese children’s shows about sheep and wolves I used to watch, and the uncles and aunties cooing at my sister and me, xiao-bao and da-bao, as they invited us in for a party. My name reminds me of where I came from and what shaped me as a child.
And yet I cannot count the number of people I know who changed the pronunciation of their name because it was just easier—Zheng to ‘Z-AY-ng,’ Liu to ‘L-OO,’ and countless others. When you grow up American, speaking English at school and stuttering through words at home, the Americanized version just seems to fit better. Not necessarily because the pronunciation makes it easier to fit in to a white culture––in fact, the area I lived in was majority Asian and filled to the brim with Asian culture, from restaurants to Cherry Blossom and Diwali festivals run by the city––but because it suits who I am: Chinese American, not Chinese.
A name is a label: an impression to live up to. When your name belongs to an identity that you’ve left behind, on purpose or not, conforming is more comfortable than trying to clarify what you don’t even understand about yourself. I might have grown up speaking Mandarin with a Chinese family, but as I entered high school and college, I stopped speaking it as much. I stopped celebrating some of the festivals. My classes were in English, as were my extracurriculars, as well as the books I read and the shows I watched. I couldn’t really bring myself to call myself Chinese when I didn’t even know how to describe myself in Chinese. So ‘W-AY-ng’ just made sense: ethnic but not quite, warped into something quintessentially American from a Chinese foundation.
After that graduation ceremony, I started wondering what I was really grieving. I felt like I had lost a part of my identity, but that loss had been ingrained for years by then. I hated that I was drifting from my culture, but I only hated it when I remembered the gap existed. I built myself around it. Especially going into college, I was coming to terms with a lot of changes in who I was. I was exploring new hobbies, trying to figure out my sexuality, and experimenting with different fashion styles. I’d changed in other ways; my culture just happened to have the clearest boundary between past and present—the change that was easiest to notice. I didn’t bother with correcting my name, not just because I wasn’t sure what suited me culturally, but what suited my identity.
It hit me then that I had focused so much on definitions that I didn’t think about potential. It’s a strange form of perfectionism; I feel like I have to know who I am before I can let other people perceive me. But in many ways, that approach is incompatible with growth. There’s someone I want to be: someone more in touch with my culture, someone who is braver, someone who is more creative, someone who is more responsible––a million other descriptors that change every day. I will always be grieving something, as leaving parts of myself behind is an inherent part of that change. If I tried to prevent that grief, to anchor my self-perception and name to a concrete point within that change, I would be constantly out of date with the new changes in my identity.
I never corrected anyone at my high school graduation. But the college school year has started again. Another round of introductions, of teachers calling out and stumbling over names. I’ve taken to correcting people about my last name. Just a quick word: when they call out, “April W-AY-ng?” I’ll interject, “Wang, yep!”
Right now, I feel like a name is a wish. An experiment. I may not know who I am, but I know who I want to be. I want to connect more to my Chinese culture, so I say ‘W-AH-ng’ instead of ‘W-AY-ng.’ I want to be more social, to be more confident in my identity, so I correct people even when it makes my heart pound and my mind cringe. Maybe in the future that’ll change. Maybe I’ll go by my middle name because April is so common that I’d like something more unique. Maybe I’ll change my name because it won’t suit me anymore. Who knows? A name may be a label, but there’s a reason names aren’t in the dictionary.
