Junior Annie Cui chose her name “out of a hat.” Cui left her home in China, at age five as “Jiahui” and returned almost nine years later as “Annie.”
It was not until Cui’s first day of kindergarten in Newton that she first faced issues regarding her Chinese name. “The teacher had trouble pronouncing my name, so she was like ‘Oh, well, I think that the other kids are going to have trouble pronouncing it,’” Cui said.
Cui’s teacher suggested that she adopt a nickname to use in school. “I actually don’t think I reacted [to the teacher’s proposition],” Cui said. “I didn’t say no, but I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, yeah!’”
Cui is just one of many foreign-born students who decide to change their birthnames to something more “American.” For senior Chen Cao, selecting a nickname to use in school was a more strategic process. Cao, who was born in Beijing, China, as “Chenzhe,” chose the name “Chen” because it was already very similar to his birth name.
Even so, Cao’s nickname was to some extent decided for him. When he came to America in second grade, “[people] cut what they couldn’t pronounce” of his name. "Since everyone’s in second grade, it was kind of hard to say the whole entire name … it just kind of happened,” Cao said. “I liked it, so I just kind of went along with it.”
Although Cao grew to like his nickname, he initially wanted a more westernized English name. Cao and his father, however, had very different ideas of suiting western names. “We couldn’t come up with a compromise,” Cao said, so they settled with “Chen.”
Junior Seong-tae Han, who moved to America from Korea when he was four, thought changing his birth name to avoid complication was not worth losing the sentimental value embedded in his name.
“I kept [my original name] because my grandpa named me, and then he died,” Han said. “It’s like a memorial.”
Junior Sandy Shen’s parents were less willing to alter their daughter’s birth name, Yuanzhao. “[My mom] was more emotionally attached [than I was],” Shen said. “You can be special,” Shen’s mother told her.
Though Shen moved to America when she was three, she didn’t change her birth name until she moved from New York to Newton in second grade. “I went by my birth name for two years at my old school, and then when I moved here, I decided to go by something more pronounceable,” she said.
“I was the new kid when I first moved here, so no one had been used to [calling me] my old name anyway … it was a convenient time to change it,” she said.
When Shen’s parents finally allowed Shen to change her name, they gave her no restrictions on what she could choose. “I guess they thought that as long as I was changing it, it was going to be different anyway,” she said.
Shen eventually decided on Sandy because of its resemblance to the Chinese nickname for Yuanzhao, pronounced “Sen-sen.”
“I had given it a lot of thought before I decided to just change my name,” Shen, who legally changed her name this past summer, said. “It’s not something you just do in the spur of the moment.”
Though she believes that changing a birth name deserves serious thought, Shen does not think that her name determines her link to her heritage.
Cao, on the other hand, feels the nature of his nickname still connects him to his roots.
“As I was growing up, I kind of liked being called Chen, because it furthered the connection that I [had with] China … it’s like a cultural thing,” Cao said.
“Thinking about it now, … it seems much cooler just being Chen [instead of] trying to come up with some American name.”
