The first week of my in-person semester of college was full of names. My conversations always started with “Hello! My name is Alex. What’s yours?” My name defines me and becomes the label which represents every detail about me. It contains the stories of my past and is how I am remembered.
I have two names by which others address me. My Korean name is the correct one; all official records of my existence call me Yeongseo. My Korean-speaking acquaintances know me as Yeongseo and it is how I am called most of the time. However, the unique spelling of this name and the difference in the verbal sounds used in Korean and English makes it difficult for my English-speaking friends to pronounce my name. Hence, I chose a second name: Alex. My friends in high school and college call me Alex.
Having two names, I was often asked this specific question by friends: Do you feel different when you are called Yeongseo and when you are called Alex? I have given this question plenty of thought, in fact. At first, it felt as if I should feel different, since my two names are so different from one another. However, the answer is no, I do not feel different at all. Both Yeongseo and Alex represent me and resonate with me. They may represent different sides of me; Yeongseo is me in the Korean community whereas Alex is me with international friends. But both are still me as I chose to be called by those names.
Speaking of choice in names, I remember one of the conversations I had with a professor a few weeks ago. Although it is the widespread norm to address professors by their last names this professor asked us to call her by her first name. The reason she mentioned was that only her first name was genuinely hers - not her father’s nor her grandmother’s. Her words presented an entirely new aspect of names to me. By asking students to address her by her first name, she asked us to recognize her identity as it is, not in regards to other people. Similarly, while my family name represents (obviously) my family, my first name - Yeongseo/Alex - is unique to me. In other words, my name is my identity - it is how I want others to perceive me.
Names and its relation to identity also remind me of a novella I read recently. In Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, in which three Palestinian men in refugee camps endeavor to illegally enter Kuwait hiding in a lorry to earn money, we see the slow extinction of names. The men do not succeed and die while entering Kuwait because of the extreme heat of the desert and their names, along with their lives, are taken away. Once they are dead, the author refers to them as “the first corpse,” “the other corpse,” and “the third corpse.” Hence, the readers have no means to identify them anymore.
Then what becomes of these men now? What is left of them? Without names, would anyone remember them? Having been called a certain name in my whole life, I cannot imagine a situation in which I lose my name. In essence, names are merely a group of alphabets we chose, but somehow they become the most important word in our lives. What do you make of names? What does your name mean to you?