Recently, I committed a cultural faux pas. I had watched the excellent documentary about the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ira Glasser, called Mighty Ira. I recommended it to a friend who is a lawyer in Dublin because we often talk about free speech stuff. At the link I sent, though, mightyira.com, the film’s title is rendered in caps, MIGHTY IRA. And that hits differently in Ireland.
I thought of this awkward incident again soon after, when I read a piece in the New Yorker titled “America Ruined My Name for Me,” written by Beth Nguyen. Its author has the given name Bich Nguyen, and she recounts the struggle of living in America with that name (properly pronounced like the lighter). I don’t wish to downplay what sounds like some scarring childhood and, indeed, lifelong bullying. But I was struck by the way her piece asserted that her struggle was one against, specifically, race hate. “I can’t write about my name without writing about racism, and I can’t write about racism without writing about violence. I remember being a kid and hearing my dad and uncles whispering about the murder of Vincent Chin, in Detroit, in 1982. Today, I talk to my kids about the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta. I’m teaching them about colonization, Orientalism, and anti-Asian immigration laws.” What’s more: “These days, we are extra careful when we leave the house.”
I’d never gainsay someone for hanging on to a name that causes grief or for taking the path that she did, jettisoning a moniker. But I know enough to see when a magazine that is trying to be especially alert to any whiff of broad cultural insensitivity is crowbarring something into a narrative where it doesn’t quite fit. Is the fact that it is deeply uncomfortable to be named Bich in English-language-dominated America, especially as an adolescent, really evidence of some broader cultural truth about America being unreceptive to people from foreign cultures? I think not.
My own name, Nick, is a no-go in any of the countries of the world where Arabic dominates. When I’ve traveled in the Arab world, I make sure to use Nicholas, because “nik” is how you say the F-word there. Those countries aren’t hateful of me, though. These are just homophonic coincidences: funny from the outside, tragic if they dog your every day.
And it’s not limited to the cultural contact between European languages and Asian ones. Shakespeare wrote plays about kings named Richard. Yet, statistically, people in America named Richard have gone, over time, from taking the nickname Dick to Rich or Rick more often. The reason is almost certainly the same crummy adolescent mockery as Nguyen describes. In philosophy classes across the English-speaking world, people make the same pun on the surname of Immanuel Kant. And as I found out by accident, poor Ira Glasser would have had a hard time in Ireland.
Related examples abound. A recent Guardian headline reads, “Life’s a Bitche: Facebook says sorry for shutting down town’s page.” It turns out the small town of Ville de Bitche got caught up in the algorithmic filters. “The name of our town seems to suffer from a bad interpretation,” the mayor said. Still, French people need not take extra care leaving the house. These aren’t features of Anglosphere-wide intolerance; they’re just coincidences.
“Names are deeply personal and deeply public,” as Nguyen says. Still, we shouldn’t selectively take the inevitable awkward linguistic friction points of a pluralistic culture personally. It miscasts a cultural virtue as a vice.
