A NAME OR TWO
Being multiethnic in America
In a church near Boston, 1997, a woman in a white gown, elegantly walks down the aisle. Surrounded by her loved ones, from Japan and Boston, she takes each step down the red carpet to her new life. She walks up to a slightly older Chinese man, a man who left a life of struggles behind and decided to face his new reality head on with the love of his life. A union between two ethnicities – two cultures. The two of them had faced many judgments from not only their families but by their friends across the Pacific. But here, in the United States of America, none of that mattered. They face each other as the priest announces the marriage ritual. After the iconic union vows, the woman and now husband, hand in hand, jolt out the church doors, and drive away to their new life. A new country, half-way across the world from their homelands.
Flash forward a few years later and it’s my first day of seventh grade. I walked into school with some of that “new year, new me” confidence. I sat down in the front row lined with clean desks and the fresh scent of lemon-scented cleaning wipes. Other students, some I knew, some I didn’t, filed into the room after me and sat behind me. The teacher strolled into the classroom with his supplies.
“Students,” he said, “welcome to my class.” As he walked over to his desk, he reached for the attendance list. The teacher walked back to the center of the room and said in a slightly embarrassed voice, “I’m sorry if I butcher some of your names…”
The teacher began to read out names one by one. He pronounced the Anglophone names with ease. Then, there was a long pause. A long, dreaded pause was all I needed to know what was going to happen next. He sighed, eyes twitching and lips quivering.
He took a breath and grimaced as the words sputtered out of his mouth. “A…Akey yo-shy?”
A long dramatic silence filled the room. People looked around. Those who knew me instantly knew what came next.
“That’s me,” I responded shyly.
“Did I pronounce that right?” He asked.
“Well…” I stuttered. Now, all eyes were on me. I could feel the weight of my classmates’ eyes as I looked down in embarrassment.
“It’s pronounced Ah-key-yoh-she,” I said, “but you can just call me Patrick.”
You see, my legal name is Akiyoshi Tan. Well, it’s actually Akiyoshi Patrick Tan. However, people call me Patrick. The name Akiyoshi approximately means “joy of the sunrise.” The “Aki” means sunrise, while “Yoshi” means joy. They’re both derived from Japanese, but the characters associated with the latter word “Yoshi” is actually significant to a long tradition in my Chinese side of the family where people would have a list of characters to name their child with. The character for Akiyoshi (旭慶) can be read in Chinese as “Xu Qing.” This, along with my name, Akiyoshi Tan, identified who I was. I wasn’t just Japanese, but Chinese too. My name was something I could hold onto while living in a country that considered both as foreign. Because of this, I loved the name Akiyoshi. It was a part of who I was. However, as I grew up in a predominately non-Japanese community, I increasingly began to realize that not everyone could pronounce my name at first sight, which caused problems throughout my childhood. So, I decided to call myself by my middle name, Patrick.
“Wow, Patrick,” my friend during Junior year would tell me. “Akiyoshi is such a cool name! Why don’t you call yourself that?” She asked.
The truth is, they both meant me. One used predominately in the house, in Japanese, and the other in public, in English. People often saw this name as evidence that I was too “westernized,” or “whitewashed,” but it’s hard to say that about myself when Patrick is a part of my name, not one I gave myself to assimilate into Anglo-Saxon culture. While I did have issues coming to terms with the idea that I may be too “westernized,” I didn’t like the idea that I was trying too hard to assimilate to the dominant culture of the United States.
My last name in English is always Tan, a Chinese name. My father tried to teach me Chinese, but I never picked it up that well. He was always busy with work and making sure that we would never go hungry. When he was younger, he would go out into the countryside and have to scavenge for food. He wanted a better life for us, and for himself. He left his home city of Chongqing and, on a scholarship, attended graduate school and worked in Japan. He learned the Japanese language and met a young Japanese woman, my mother. Since then, my father has found his world split in threes. Three linguistic worlds: Japanese, Chinese, and English. This was somewhat similar to the duality or triality that I lived in. A world where I would converse in Japanese with my family, English with my American friends, and experience a slight tangible connection to the Chinese language. This world split into three where I could leave one world and enter the next but be forced to lose something in exchange.
I would think about the times my parents would specifically call me “Aki” or “Akiyoshi” in Japanese, but mention me as “Patrick” in English, signifying the two worlds I lived in at the moment. One that was my house, still tied to the Japanese culture it desperately tried to hold onto, whereas the other was American, a world where my name as “Akiyoshi” was rejected. I also lived in a majority Chinese-American community, where people would perceive me as different for having Japanese heritage. Many in the community suffered under the Japanese occupation of China during World II, so an unwelcoming reception by some kids was certainly an understatement. I guess I used “Patrick” to further shield myself from that prejudice, to connect with the other “Kevins” and “Daniels” in my town. Having a super Japanese name in the middle of a Chinese-American group seemed odd to me. It was like erasing the Chinese identity in me. So, Patrick I remained. Patrick Tan – it had a nice ring to it. I would only use my full name “Akiyoshi Patrick Tan,” in legal documents to prove that I recognized the importance of “Akiyoshi” as a cultural indicator of my ancestral home.
I had small internal conflicts about my name, but the biggest conflict happened when I was fourteen. I was watching a BuzzFeed video on the concept of names in the context of the Asian-American experience. In the video, an Indian-American girl questions a Korean-American why he never uses his first name. She felt the pride of her name and never questioned her identity, for it was a part of her, whether people liked it or not. The Korean-American called himself by an English name to please the expectations and pressures of a majority English-speaking nation.
“Why?” the girl asked. “Why follow the crowd and be like other Americans, when you can embrace your own culture?”
After watching the video, I could only feel the sharp pain of embarrassment for neglecting my name for so long. I struggled to fall asleep, thinking whether I should abandon the complexity of having two names. Why should I call myself a name that had no connotations to my culture? What good did calling myself Patrick do but disregard my cultural history?
Patrick was a name that came from Irish immigrants from the 1850s during the Irish potato famine. While the Irish-American name became anglicized and is now prominent in many Irish-American families, this middle name was given to me by my Irish-American god mother (Apparently, she wanted the naming right for my middle name). Patrick to me mean more than just a simple Americanized name. It was proof of me as an immigrant. That, yes, while my name is Americanized, it represents me trying to fit in with everyone else. Eastern culture clashes with the West.
My parents never really told me why they left their homelands. My father would tell me how he left for better opportunities, but it wasn’t explicitly clear why they both left Japan. It wouldn’t be a surprise if they knew that our mixed heritage would have no place in the fairly homogenous countries of China and Japan, where racial purity was almost like a ritual in culture. When they stated their marriage vows before the priest in Boston, they were making a promise. A promise to preserve their culture. A promise that no matter how hard it would be to bring children in a bicultural environment, they would make it happen. It could be that my parents found the United States, a land of opportunity and multiculturalism as a place to start a new, a land where we can all express our cultures without judgment from others.
Maybe someday I will go back to being called Akiyoshi. It may be next year, or it might be after my time in college in this diverse city of New York. But I am in no rush to accept who I truly am and come to terms with my name and upbringing. Someone once told me that there isn’t a road map to finding your identity as an Asian-American, and I think that’s true. Some Asian-Americans find it easy to find their place in America, while others have bumps and pot-holes littering their way. Change and identities don’t come instantly, they come when you are prepared to start anew. They come when I am ready to accept myself for who I really am. No one needs to find their identity overnight.
And I’ll take as long as necessary.
April 2020: The author has now chosen to call himself Akiyoshi or "Aki," still, friends in high school are free to call him Patrick.