On having a unique name

it's rough out there for those of us name weirdos

Fellow Former Migrant Workers,

Hey! Long time no email, even though we swore we’d keep up. I was thinking about you all the other day, and our time abroad—so many good times we had! Supper Club! Red Tent Weekend! Jocks VS Nerds Surprise Party! Weekends at Min’s in the mountains! Now that we’re in middle age, I reminisce, but I don’t want to recreate them. There are other things that I miss from our time abroad. I just don’t know who to talk to about the experience. For instance, the one thing I’ve missed the most since I’ve come back is not having to explain my weird-ass name to people.

This might be surprising to many of you; of course I have a strange name, but didn’t our host country residents think my name was strange? Yes, but they also thought I was strange before they knew my name; we were foreigners, after all. Remember just walking around, minding your own business, and hearing someone exclaim in the local language, “Look! A foreigner!”? Just our appearance was extraordinary, sometimes disruptively so. If it ever got to my name (which it rarely did), it was just part of my obvious foreignness and there weren’t a lot of questions about my name.

Back home, in Anglophoneland, when I meet people, they think I’m normal until they get to my name. “Moxie?” They question, and then I correct them to my actual name—a nickname, because no one but my cousin Mike has ever called me by my first full name. Later, when they try to recall, they call me “Trixie” because it’s the closest thing to a normal name that’s been used before. Yes, I’m talking about you, Canadian Mike, but you weren’t the only one.

Sometimes they attempt to flirt and say, “Oh, like Foxy”, which is so disgusting and has actually turned me off from people I was interested in. Sometimes they’d even do the “Foxy Lady” dance from Wayne’s World—so gross—and also didn’t even occur to me until after I turned twenty-seven and Wayne’s World had been out for almost two decades, so it made me feel real good about both how I looked then, and the ten years before when no one did it. And I’m sure that some of you fuckers did it, too, and look where it got you.

I could also talk about the teasing I got as a child for my name, but I don’t want to be too ranty about my name from before we lived abroad, so let’s skip over that.

When people encounter my full name on paper, it’s a craps shoot as to what they will say. In fact, I’m sensitized to both my name and other names that someone might try to say as well as words that might sound like my name. In college, I had the same instructor for two semesters (Excursions in Mathematics I and II) and he called me Alexandra the whole year. I just couldn’t figure out how to correct him.

There’s also how every customer service call I ever make takes 10 times longer than with a normal name because I have to spell my name and English letters all sound the same. And you’d think that I would learn the telephone alphabet thing, but I just do one that I’ve made up with regular words that I use all the time, like “I as in ‘ice cream’.” I do love ice cream.

So there’s that. There’s sitting in interviews at jobs, and, of course, using my full name on my resume because everyone’s supposed to be enlightened now and not racist (but I can tell you that is not true, which I’ll get to later) and listening to them attempt to pronounce my name, “Ah-OOK-see-eh…da…da?” And then I have to correct them, a potential boss. The very first thing I have to do is tell them they’re wrong, and actually, just call me Auxie, no, I don’t write it Oxy. Not a great first impression on someone you want to give you money.

Then there’s the question about the source of my name. I’ve developed a standard lie that it’s a family name, but people get their own ideas. One friend, a bit younger than me, asked me if I was named for the drug OxyContin. I think he was joking; he either didn’t realize how old I was or that the drug was relatively new, a modern marvel of exploitation.

Younger people than me are a bit more understanding; they have those funky spellings of Ashleigh or Katelynn. But I’m of an age and race where people just didn’t have made-up names. And the source of my name is traumatic. If my parents knew what was best for me, I wouldn’t even know how I got it.

The truth was—and I don’t think I’ve ever told any of you, Former Migrant Friends, because it was so painful—is that my parents didn’t think of a name for a girl until I was born. They thought I would be a boy. For some reason, ultrasounds to determine gender weren’t available to them at Kaiser Permanente in 1983. I came into this world with a vagina and no gender-appropriate name (not that I’m big into that, but they are). My father, drunk in despair, getting ready to go to work, thought of things he loved: his dog, Rusty, and trips to Baja, and threw out a word he knew in Spanish. My mother, who taught me how to spite people, changed the spelling to go with my sisters’ “Au” names, because our names all had to start with the same letters. This is also one of the reasons why I hated celebrating my birthday, but not the only one.

Not having to be asked to think about that history by every person I meet is one of the reasons why I miss our time abroad.

It took me a long time to find an appropriate professional name; again, my parents didn’t do me any favors when they decided to honor my grandmother Erma with my middle name (and yes, I know you didn’t know that either), but I’ve gotten one for my new venture. It’s silly that it took me this long; I guess I just stubbornly believed that people were better than they actually are, or was willing to take that chance over and over again.

I have to say now that I don’t go by my weird legal name, people are a lot nicer and respectful to me. Beforehand, when I showed up with my legal name for a job interview, they treated me like I was a grifter with no skills. They’d try to catch me in lies about where I went to school, my teaching or professional experience or principles of my profession (yes, I know how to administer benefits). Now that I go by a normal Anglo name, they just assume I’ve got all these skills on my CV, and the conversations are so much easier. They trust me so much more. Finally, in my home country, I get to taste this flavor of white privilege.

Former Fellow Migrant Workers, I know many of you wouldn’t go back to our host country—we could have stayed but we didn’t! By golly, though, I sure miss not having to think about how fucked up the country I come from is every time I tell people what to call me.

I already lost Canadian Mike, because he’s surely deleted this email grumbling, “Just go change your legal name!” Or, “Why didn’t you change your first name as well as your last when you got married?” Well, it’s a big pain in the ass to change your legal name (like $500 for just the paperwork) and, in the US, you can only change your last name for free when you get married. And I didn’t. Because I like it.

It could be a lot worse, though: I could have an equally hard last name to pronounce, so I have to go through the spelling and correct pronunciation with that name, too. Ooh, or I could have a first name that’s a homophone for some concept of utopia in the white supremacists’ ideology and then be as off-putting to ethnic and religious minorities as I am to white people with my legal name.

The rest of you that made it this far, hope you’re well and I’d love to hear how you’re coping now that you’ve been back in Anglophoneland for a near decade, too.

Cheers,

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