Name Changing Post

Posts about changing names have been popular lately so I thought I'd add a short note of my own.

Sunny has a very standard Anglo-Saxon first name, middle name and then his biological mother's last name, which is kind of unusual but also Anglo-Saxon.

By coincidence, his middle name is the same as Guy's middle name and his father's first name.

We never thought about changing his first name, because that's what he's used to. We might have thought about changing his middle name if it wasn't already the same as my husband's. We were originally going to add on (my last name) hyphen (Guy's last name). Our workers said they didn't think that was a good idea, the name was too long then, and we should just drop his original last name. We went along with what they said.

A few months ago, when I talked about names with Sunny, he mentioned that he liked his last name and didn't want it to go away completely. We have the final word over that, so we're going to go back to the original plan and he'll stay with firstname middlename biolastname adoptedhyphenatedlastname. It's going to lead to bureaucratic complications, but what the heck, tons of people with Spanish-style sentence-length names deal with that already.

That's one of the advantages of adopting older kids, I guess. You don't have to make all the tough decisions. If Sunny feels like changing his name later, it's up to him. Right now he's happy with what he has.

As for me, I have an Anglo-Saxon first name, Japanese middle name and Anglo-Saxon last name. When I meet people for the first time, I frequently get a double take. "You're (confused look ) (insert name)?" It's irritating because I like my name and think it suits me just fine. The worst is when I tell someone my last name and then they sort of knit their eyebrows together, sigh, and ask me how to spell it, because since I look Asian of course it's got to have tricky sneaky weird spelling. I can tell when they're doing this to be obtuse as opposed to regular spelling confirmations. My last name should be impossible to misspell! It's like "Miller" or "Cook" but they're expecting me to spell it "Ng".

When I was born, my mother gave me her last name. My father was there, but they weren't married at the time, and weren't even planning on getting married. The hospital staff didn't understand her freewheeling feminist ways, so they gave me my father's last name even though she told them not to. She later corrected them and my social security card was issued under my correct last name. My original birth certificate still has the wrong name on it, and I had to do an official name change five years ago even though I've been using my current name all my life anyway.

All of this makes me very resistant to the idea of having the "right name" and conforming to social conventions on naming.

On the other hand, I've done some career counseling before. And this has never come up, but if I did career counseling with someone with a very "ghetto" name, I would almost certainly float the idea to initialize their name on resumes or applications. There's a difference between what's right, what's ethical and what will actually get you the job. The statistics are pretty grim.

One argument against conforming is that you wouldn't want to work in a racist workplace anyway. I think that's too stark of a choice. We're not comparing working at Office KKK versus Office NAACP. Many hiring managers are subconsciously biased but can make more egalitarian decisions when actually face to face with someone. Also, a lot of people just really need the paycheck right now. For example, given a choice between depressing jobs, I'd rather work in a racist call center than in a non-racist chicken-processing plant.

There are plenty of good ethical arguments against conforming. It's a terrible thing to give up a little piece of yourself like that.

The better off you are, the more control you have over your environment and the less your name matters. I'm lucky I have a decent job and I don't have to worry about it much. And my face-not-matching-name issues are irritating, but they've never really affected me economically.

If I had my father's last name things would have been different. My father's last name is long and incredibly difficult for the average English speaker to spell or pronounce. It inspires panic and can almost produce tears of frustration. It's kind of funny to watch, in a perverse way.