Sam I am not

I grew up with stories of people in the extended family having worked in Rangoon, Singapore, and Ceylon.  Those were during the days of the British Raj.  They were forced to rush to India when Japan started attacking Burma and Singapore. 

Most of them managed to get away well ahead of time, but a few had no choice but to trek through jungle trails before they could get transportation to peninsular India.  One of them later recalled those stories during a conversation in which I systematically guided her with questions about those days that interested me. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of her childhood in Rangoon was her school, which was run by Christian missionaries.  "We were all given Christian names," she said.  Kalyani was Bernadette at school.

While the name Bernadette was thrust on Kalyani as a price to pay to study at a missionary-run school, it was not unusual for many students I knew in graduate school in the US to voluntarily assume a Christian name.  Such practice was more frequent among students from China and South Korea, and rarely from students who were from Islamic countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia. 

Even a few Indian students walked around with Christian names that they used with their non-Indian friends.  A classmate from my engineering college, who did his MS in Texas, became Andy; after all these years, I have even forgotten the part of his name that has now morphed into Andy!

In my first full time employment in California, a colleague often joked that had I come to the country a hundred years prior, I would have been registered in the documents at Ellis Island at Sam Murphy.  That is impossible for one and only one reason: Back then people from India could not immigrate to the US.  Immigration laws clearly excluded us "Asiatic" people.

We browns started trickling into the country only after the atrocious Chinese Exclusion Act was thrown out and immigration laws were reformed.  It was a bold move to Make America Great Again!

The trickle slowly at first, and then rapidly, became a flood of non-whites immigrating to America.  Quite a few assumed Christian names in order to fit in, and gave their children names from their cultures that would not stand out too much in the adopted land. 

Now, some of them are beginning to take ownership of their "real" names and cultures.

Marian Chia-Ming Liu writes about her experiences in the Washington Post.  "Over the years, I’d essentially erased the middle two words of the name on my birth certificate: Marian Chia-Ming Liu." 

In reclaiming her name, she explains what it means:

The middle character is one I share with all my first cousins on my father’s side. It comes from a poem that dates back to the Qin dynasty, 221 B.C. Each generation takes the next word. Other cultures that use pictographs in their languages, like Japanese and Korean, says Maasbach, also use poems in their names. While it’s spelled out as “Chia” in English, it’s pronounced more like “Jiā” (家) and means “home” — which is particularly significant to me as a journalist who has moved across the country and world for work.

Lastly, my individual name — like a first name in English — is Ming (明). (The same character as former NBA player Yao Ming’s name.) Combined with the middle character, the name is rather masculine; my grandfather didn’t want me to be the kind of woman who needed a man to depend on. One side of the character is a sun and the other the moon. Together, the character means “bright,” and next to my grandfather’s name, Tsong (聪明), the resulting phrase means “smart.”

There is so much to her name that we outsiders wouldn't have known.  I am blown away with the explanation!

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet," wrote Shakespeare.  If only we recognized and appreciated the sweetness in "strange" sounding names!