My parents preferred to be surprised by the sex of their children at birth, so they kept two names on standby for me: Maximillian Spartacus if I was a boy, Tracy if I was a girl. I think we can all agree, for bullying mitigation purposes, it is better I was born female.
Tracy is a name that peaked in popularity in the U.S. during the seventies when my parents were young, and depending on which source you consult, its origins are either English, Irish, French, or Greek—at the very least Western. In general, I like my name, except when I am reminded that its origins do not match mine.
Years ago, when I was in high school, this discrepancy was brought to my attention.
“Tracy—now there’s an American name,” the substitute English teacher said, eyeing the flimsy class roster through smudged lenses. When I raised my hand, he cocked his graying head, adjusted the leather belt buckling beneath his paunchy belly, and added, with more surprise than contempt, “But you’re not American.” My cheeks burned in shame while my classmates looked to each other for calibration, open-mouthed and more indignant than I was. The accusation caught me off guard because I never actively thought about my race or how Americanism was so often conflated with whiteness. I knew I was Chinese-American just as much as I knew my name was Tracy. I was so startled I didn’t think to defend myself.
I tended to take my Americanness for granted because, in New Jersey, my family and I stewed in a suburban racism that only boiled over every once in a while. My mom likes to tell my siblings and me a story about when we first moved from New York City into our house on a hill when I was around two. A neighbor swung by to welcome us and asked, slowly, enunciating every syllable as soon as my mom opened the door, “Do. You. Speak. American?”
“No,” she said, without missing a beat, “I speak English.”
“Oh, thank God,” the neighbor said, not realizing her own error in neglecting to distinguish between a nationality and a language. She was the kind of person who would also refer to us as Oriental, as though we were goods to be traded. The same kind of person who would synonymize “Chinese Auction” with “Tricky Tray” because “the Chinese are tricky.” It is often like this for us, prejudice born of ignorance rather than intentional hostility.
Though, sometimes when I was growing up people were downright malicious. I remember one afternoon in kindergarten, sitting in a circle on the muddy tile in the school’s all-purpose room and playing the game hot potato with a rust-colored kickball covered in a crosshatch pattern. The light was weak, but as I waited for the ball, I could see across from me there were two white kids, their hair arranged into the popular mushroom style of the mid-nineties, tugging their eyes by the corners into the shape of slits. They stuck their tongues out at me and their small bodies quaked with laughter. As I watched their faces twist into grotesque expressions, I really wondered to myself, Are they trying to make fun of me? Even as a child, I recognized a poor attempt at mockery. I ignored them, hoping they’d stop if I didn’t give them the attention they so obviously sought, and they did.
It wasn’t until I worked as a summer-camp counselor at the local YMCA between my junior and senior years of high school that hostile racism manifested. As I was crossing the parking lot after work, squinting in the hot midday sun, a van full of teenagers approached me. The window rolled down, and out shot a plastic water bottle aimed at my head, accompanied by the word “chink.” The water bottle missed and crumpled beside me as soon as it hit the pavement, but the word stuck. It was such an ugly word, one I only knew as an insult from the way it was uttered—with disgust and spite. Only later did I learn it was a racial slur. Again, I was more shocked than hurt or even angry. The threat was fleeting. I brushed the incident off silently and kept walking as the van sped away. My parents had warned me that in these situations, it was better to rise above it, maintain our dignity. “Don’t react,” they’d say. “Don’t let them see they got to you.” Racism was a given, and we bore it. I assumed it was part of being American.
My ancestors are Chinese, but I am about as American as they come—born here, raised in the suburbs; I grew up watching Nickelodeon and eating Fruit By The Foot, playing in recreation basketball leagues and dining at all-you-can-eat buffets. I wasn’t white, and I didn’t want to be. My dad emigrated from China when he was ten. My mother was born in New York and raised in Connecticut. We were part of the great American melting pot I read about in history class. I never questioned our Americanness. If anything, we weren’t as Chinese as our round faces and almond-shaped eyes suggested we should be, and this I felt acutely.
Sure, my parents had fought a valiant battle to keep my siblings and me immersed in our heritage, with dim sum every other week, hot steaming baos and dumplings for breakfast, and annual visits to the cemetery to pay respect to our ancestors. Each Chinese New Year, my mom would put on a bright red sweater and tie a decorative scarf around her neck to give a presentation about the holiday to my elementary school class. The color was a nod to our cultural belief in red’s luckiness, but the outfit was purely contemporary American. She’d play a cassette-tape recording of a celebratory parade in China—the thundering fireworks and steadily pounding drums warding off evil spirits and welcoming the year ahead—and my white classmates listened, enthralled, while I basked in the temporary light of being special because I was Chinese. I was the only person of Chinese descent in my grade until middle school. “Isn’t it great?” my mom would say, winking at me, “We get to celebrate New Year twice.”
For two years when we were in elementary school, my younger brother and I attended Chinese school on Sundays. “To get in touch with your roots,” my dad said. We hated going and not just because it was a forty-minute drive to the school in Towaco. Classes were held in the back room of a church, which made us uncomfortable enough as non-Christians, and since neither of us knew any Mandarin, we were placed in a beginner class with children half our age. Most of them spoke it fluently at home and were only there to learn how to read and write. We spoke English at home and were only occasionally exposed to the sing-song Cantonese dialect of Chinese that our extended family speaks. Though both dialects share the same written language, Mandarin, the official dialect, has an entirely different pronunciation—sharper, nasal, a bit harsh even. My dad wanted us to learn Mandarin because it would be more useful, even though Cantonese would have brought us closer to him and the rest of our family.
Most Sundays during that time, my brother and I sat bewildered at desks that were too small while our teacher spouted Mandarin without stopping to translate. We’d clumsily flip open our floppy textbooks starting from the back cover and attempt to read from top to bottom, right to left, feeling like fools. If we were lucky, we could maybe recognize one out of every five characters. On worksheets, the space for our names would always be vertical, expecting a few characters rather than the multiple letters our English names required. We literally did not fit. We might have physically resembled our classmates, but we felt so utterly like we did not belong because everyone else seemed more Chinese than we were, with their Chinese names and near-native speaking fluency. The sham we felt the endeavor to be only guaranteed our failure—in my case, C’s, in my brother’s, actual F’s. My dad, citing problems with the methodology, eventually allowed us to drop out.
“The bopomofo system! They should be using pinyin instead,” he said, but it reeked of excuse. If he was disappointed in our lack of interest and progress, he didn’t show it—I think he had, in his heart, resigned himself to our American fate. “We’ll find a new school,” he said, but we never did.
By the early 2000s, around the time we quit Chinese school, my mom had stopped giving her annual presentation, and we stopped visiting the cemetery. The inertia of American cultural hegemony proved too strong. As a result, we became more like the Christmas and Easter Christians, only we clung to our gold-embellished red envelopes, dancing lions and dragons, and half-remembered gung hay fat choys at Chinese New Year.
The older generations, from my aunts and uncles to the waiters at our local Chinese restaurant, lamented the loss of a shared culture and language as they shook their heads and spoke about my cousins and me in Cantonese while we dug into our beef and broccoli in brown sauce, crunchy pan-fried noodles, and Peking pork chops with forks instead of chopsticks: They understand, but they can’t respond. Which was all too true. At every event—from the Hundred Day parties to the Chinatown wedding banquets—it was always the same refrain. They might have said more, but that was the extent of my understanding. That and a steadfastly unconfrontational undercurrent of disappointment.
In jest, my cousins and I called each other Twinkies—yellow on the outside and white on the inside. “Are you Chinese or what?” we’d sometimes ask each other whenever one of us did something particularly egregious, like skip the rice at a meal or ask for a glass of ice water instead of tea. For that matter, we could barely order the food we liked so much. Our accents always hit the tone at a slant rather than head-on, so we had to slide into the right sound. We tried uttering single words and sometimes mangled Chinglish before resorting to plain English to stop embarrassing ourselves. We laughed about our ignorance, but I felt it was a shame to be judged by your roots and also feel so disconnected from them. The guilt stayed with me until finally, in college, I decided to make more of an effort. No one deserves discrimination, but since it happens anyway, I wanted to at least feel more Chinese.
In my sophomore year of college, I decided to study Mandarin again, hoping this time would be different. My teacher was a stout woman from mainland China, with severe bangs, a chin-length bob, and an arc of light-brown freckles on each cheek. The first day of Chinese 101, she approached each non-Asian student and inspected them, jutting out her rounded chin and narrowing her small, dark eyes while she mulled over the right transliterated name to bestow. She aimed to keep most of the sound of each person’s original name while selecting the right Chinese word to convey some essential attribute of them—tall, beautiful, thin. The rest of the Chinese or part-Chinese kids came armed with their own names and handed them over readily when asked. When she reached me, she gave me a hard stare, and said, “Lum? You are Cantonese? Lum is Lin in Mandarin.” When I nodded, she demanded my Chinese name.
“I don’t have one,” I said, now suddenly ashamed by the lack. Without a Chinese name, I felt even more detached and unworthy of the culture I was trying to reclaim. Being of Chinese descent offered me no advantage in that classroom or the ones before it; I was basically starting from the same blank slate as anyone else, but the fact of my ancestry made it seem like I should have known more than I did. Chinese-American. The hyphen meant I was always doomed to feel out of place.
The thought to give me a Chinese name had crossed my parents’ minds when I was born, but when they asked themselves who would use it and answered “no one,” they decided to forego it. I wanted my teacher to name me, so we could move on, but she insisted, “Ask them for one,” because I suppose it felt wrong to deprive my parents of the opportunity. Or perhaps there was some superstition against naming someone who should have her own Chinese name and claim to the motherland.
“Now?” my parents asked. “But this is America,” they protested.
They whined a little about the hassle of naming me again nineteen years after the fact, but after a few days, my dad, being the more Chinese of the two of them, came up with one: Miao’e (妙娥), which he told me translated to wonderful, and which I adopted only in class. I finally had the Chinese name to go with my face, but even that wasn’t enough to keep the seesaw of my Chinese-American identity in balance. The name got exactly three years of usage, and then, as much as I tried to keep the language fresh in my mind, that too faded away from disuse. By the time I visited China eight years after graduating, whenever I tried to speak to a native, the only thing I could manage to say in Mandarin was Wo shi meiguoren (我是美国人): I am American.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, it is not names who make us who we are. A name alone cannot make up for years of cultural neglect; it takes real work to stay engaged with your heritage. But then again, as I sign my last name Lum on a credit-card receipt, the only time I write it out in looping cursive, I think names have their own special sort of power over us. Lum, which means forest in Chinese, is only my family’s in so much as we use it. It is a paper name, purchased by a distant relative from enterprising Chinese immigrants, in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire that destroyed public birth documents. It is a name that was not handed down from our earliest ancestors but was bought and sold and, ultimately, allowed my family to immigrate to America when the Chinese Exclusion Act had expressly forbidden it. It is a name born of, raised in, and bound to America, and for that reason, I think, of all my names, Lum, the Chinese one, is the most American of them all.