I don’t like the way my real name — Megumi — sounds in English. When it’s said in English, the “u” sound is emphasized too much (“Meg-ooo-mi”), so it sounds different from the smooth and natural way my name rolls off the tongue when it’s said in Japanese. That’s why I go by Meg. It’s not out of shame of my real name because it’s something that I really love and am proud of — I love the meaning of the kanji that makes up my name (恵: the character for “blessing” or “blessed”), I love that I have a very traditional Japanese name, I love the way it sounds with my last name in Japanese (where my last name is said before my first name, instead of the other way around), and I love that my name connects me to my parents, to their homeland and to my ancestors. I appreciate that my family and my best friends from back home are the only people who call me by my real name instead of “Meg” because it makes me feel closer to them and like they know me fully.
But, it got to a point a few years ago where I got sick of people butchering my name, of teachers misreading my name (M-e-g-u-m-i) to be “Megan,” of the pause in every first day of school roll-call reading, and of feeling like my name — something for which the meaning and connection to my ethnicity is so important to me on a very personal level — was being belittled in a way. It was convenient to go by “Meg” because it’s just a shortened version of my name, so it didn’t feel as unnatural as changing my name entirely like many first or second generation Asian Americans do.
Lately, I’ve started wondering whether, by going by a more Anglicized nickname rather than my Japanese real name, I’m “whitewashing” myself. Whitewashing, or calling someone whitewashed, is basically when someone who is not white is told that they act white or want to be white while erasing their own or their family’s cultures. I know that I tell myself and others that I decided to go…
Read the full article here