I am tired of hiding my true identity and I'm starting by changing my byline.
, I was accosted online, with racist tweets and emails. To protect myself, I started wearing sunglasses in public often, to obscure my race. I became a bit of a recluse, not wanting to leave the apartment. One person I had interviewed recommended that I carry a personal alarm.The Vietnamese meal was one of my first ventures out since the start of the pandemic. As this man continued his ridicule for what felt like 10 minutes, nobody in the packed restaurant reacted.
Chinese names are incredibly purposeful. Many of them, explains Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, are made up of three characters steeped with meaning. First up is the family name, known as the last name in many Western cultures and similarly taken from the father’s side.
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.
Maasbach says Chinese American names symbolize not only our roots, but often point to our journey to America. When visitors come into the Museum of Chinese in America, she can within a few minutes place them — based on how their names are spelled in English, whether they are Anglicized and what Chinese characters are used — in a range of possible immigration periods.