“Hi! My name is Angelina,” I lie. Everyday. Because I live in America. This is a story about how I bend over backwards to accommodate white privilege. A name is just the tip of the iceberg, but let’s start there.
“What’s your name?”
My real name is Nguyễn Hùynh Thanh Trâm. My parents picked a name that reflected both sides of my family’s heritage. Nguyễn is the most common Vietnamese surname, in part because the Nguyễn dynasty was the last ruling family in Vietnam (but not all Nguyen’s are related in case you’re wondering).
Hùynh is my maternal grandfather’s family name. My middle name, Thanh, means noble. It’s shared by all of my siblings, even if we’re a generation apart, a gap created by a 20-year chapter of war and imprisonment in my dad’s life.
Trâm means daughter of an official. My mom picked Trâm because she liked the way people named Trâm are independent. “They don’t need other people’s approval,” she says, a trait that turned out to be true and that annoyed her in my teen years. (Be careful what you wish for, mom.) It’s a Tr- name that intentionally connected me to the women in my family, as my mom’s name is Trang and my sister’s is Trúc.
I felt proud of the way my name communicated my heritage, family ties and values.
None of that matters in America.
Our Vietnamese names were butchered before we arrived in America. “Tram Nguyen” looked like a fragmented sentence to me on our refugee paperwork. Cutting out half of my name was like truncating my identity and mutilating what remained. Trâm quickly degraded to Tramp or Tram (the mode of transportation). In English-speakers’ struggle to say my name – Trum[p]? Tram[p]? – and my struggle to explain, I settled on “Can you say trombone? It’s kinda like that: Trom.” And I learned to live with an unrecognizable caricature of a name.
Nguyen was especially challenging. N-gu-yen. Nu-gen. N-guy-en. What? You can say “Win”. Win? Yes, that’s good enough.
The butchering was universal. My father’s Vietnamese name is Cư. It means home. He named all his sons to align with his name, so together they are An Cư Lạc Nghiệp, meaning “peaceful home, stable career,” a simple wish he has for himself and his progeny. In America his name was pronounced Cu, like ‘coo’, a sound that means penis in Vietnamese. Needless to say his face turned red every time someone called his name.
My little brother Nghiệp was called Nip, Nipple, or Nippity Nip by kids at school. Almost every Vietnamese person had a similar butchered name story to share in those days.
As soon as we got our U.S. citizenship, we all changed our name into something American English-speakers can recognize and pronounce. Tram became Angelina. Cu converted to Thomas. Nghiep’s American name was Chris. Trang turned into Solange.
Why did we change our names?
The obvious reason was to stop embarrassing and/or insulting mispronunciations. But I want to unpack the deeper and more important reasons.
A name is the first thing people notice, use, ask for when dealing with each other. A name that is easy to pronounce creates trust and familiarity, it’s the first step to making someone feel like they know you, like you, and can trust you. I’ve lived this (and it turns out studies have found this to be true).
If your name looks hard to pronounce or someone is unsure of how to say it, they tend to avoid saying it, which means they’re less likely to approach you, get to know you, initiate conversation with you, and feel friendly with you.
A name that is easy to pronounce creates trust and familiarity, it’s the first step to making someone feel like they know you, like you, and can trust you.
Angelina Tram Nguyen
When people had to interact with Tram, they were distant, unsure, uncomfortable, awkward, and transactional in getting over the name hurdle and get to business to be done, “Is it Tram? Trum? Drum? Trom. Ok.” After all of that guesswork, they viewed Tram as a foreigner, an outsider. The gap felt too wide to bridge.
When they talk to Angelina, the level of discomfort is much lower, almost non-existent. No one has ever asked me how to pronounce Angelina or has struggled to say it. There is no barrier to making a first contact, “Hi Angelina!” People easily assume familiarity with a name they can pronounce and recognize.
This means survival in America. It’s the difference between poverty and middle-class achievability. An American name gets you more social connections and affects how you’re treated by peers and teachers at school. It enhances your ability to build a network.
An American name presents you in a better light on your resume, in emails and teleconferences. It helps win people on your side, which means more effectiveness at work, better sales, increased persuasiveness, which ultimately leads to promotions and higher income.
Consciously or not, that was why we Americanized our names. But not only did we change our names to something American, we chose names that were white.
Families chose names like David or Emily over names like Tyrone, Jose, Hassan, or Lakeisha. We don’t explicitly talk about this in my Vietnamese or refugee/immigrant circle, but at some subconscious level we know the benefits of a white name.
A white name carries implications that ultimately benefit you, whereas a non-white name can shut out opportunities. A name shapes people’s assumptions and biases about you that lead to very tangible outcomes. I’ve lived it and witnessed the different treatments a name can yield. It turns out there are studies that support this, like one that found white names are more likely to get hired.
What effect did this have?
Angelina is a survival strategy, not an identity.
I’ve learned to switch between being Tram at home and being Angelina in public. Tram loves to eat fish sauce, papaya salad, and fertilized duck eggs, things that Angelina pretend are disgusting or unfamiliar in order to fit in.
Tram thinks it’s ridiculous that some American restaurants charge $14 for a misspelled “bahn mi” that tastes worse than the real thing sold in Vietnamese restaurants for $4. Angelina ignores it when a white acquaintance comments on how much they like “foe”, the beef noodle soup; she tolerates American mispronunciation of her language and would even change the soup’s name if she could.
Tram finds peace and comfort listening to Vietnamese traditional music. Angelina not only speaks English, but specifically with an American Midwestern accent using localized rhetoric to indicate that she belongs, or at least tries to.
Some mornings Tram wants to put on a traditional Vietnamese dress but Angelina always wears Western costumes in American public spaces.
At certain points in my life, I felt my white-name Angelina was superior to my Vietnamese-sounding Tram and wished that there were no Trâm at all, but that’s a story for a different day. I’ve considered changing my name back to Trâm, but the benefits of Angelina outweighs the costs of having two personas.
Sometimes people ask me, “What do you go by? Angie, Ang, Angelina?” They always look confused when I say, “Anything is fine,” like, what, you don’t care about your name? I do, so I protect Tram from getting butchered. You see, Angelina is the equivalent of an ID number you use to identify yourself only in certain contexts, like a student ID at school, or an employee ID at work. Do you go by the last 3 digits of your ID number or the first 4? What, you don’t care? That makes sense.
Shortly after Americanizing my first name I vowed to always keep my Vietnamese last name intact. The older I get, the more Tram wants to be heard and known.
When I got married the discussion of whether or not to take my husband’s last name came up. Tram was insistent that there is at least something Vietnamese left in her full name. Angelina was doing a cost-benefit analysis of taking on a white American last name and considering her husband’s feeling.
The reality is that a full white name would be beneficial on paper or over email, but physically I am not white and assumptions will still be made based on how I look. In America, a white name can only take you so far if you’re not white. The benefit of a full white American name is not worth the cost of burying the heritage of my Vietnamese surname.
This blog grew out of Tram’s desire to be heard and seen. She is getting sick of being trapped at home all the time.
Welcome to my blog! My name is Trâm.
P.S. I was interviewed on a podcast episode of The Theresa and Eddie Show for this blog post. Tune in to hear more of my refugee story on iTunes or Spotify!