By Steve Sailer
05/08/2020
Earlier by Steve Sailer: NYT: My Daughter Passes for White
From The New York Times “Parenting” page, yet another Asian-American woman writer with a white husband brags complains about how her daughter looks white and that concerns her in an increasingly racist anti-white America a viciously white racist America where her daughter will be discriminated against get to discriminate against PoCs:
Does My Child’s Name Erase My Identity?
My husband and I gave her names that honor our heritage, but now we wonder if it’s enough.By Jami Nakamura Lin
May 5, 2020… I asked my husband my real concern, “When will she know who she is?”
When I (a Japanese-Taiwanese American woman) married my husband (a Jewish white man) I kept my last name, wanting to maintain that visible part of my identity. Our background and cultures are important to both of us, so when our daughter was born, we chose her names carefully — so carefully that she ended up with four names. Her first name honors my dead father, Charlie. Her first middle name is both Hebrew and Japanese, her second middle name is my Taiwanese last name, and her last name is my husband’s Germanic last name.
At first I thought her four names were a beautiful compromise. But at 18 months old, her eyes are bluish-gray, her hair is light brown. While I’ve tried to wrestle with what it means for her to appear so light in a society that hugely privileges whiteness, I’ve grown more uneasy about her name. Her first and last names, the most salient parts, look and sound as white as her features. This might seem like a benefit at a time when racism against Asian-Americans is rising again. To me it seems like a loss of the part of her that is me, of the part of her that is our history.
Armed with newfound regret, I asked my husband what he thought about switching Lin to be one of her last names. Though he agreed, we haven’t yet taken the plunge, partly because I’m daunted by the bureaucratic process, and partly because people have warned me about the dreaded hyphenated last name (“It will take so long to fill out forms!”). When I’m being indulgent in my daydreams, I also want to give her a fifth name, my own middle name, as well. Sometimes I convince myself that all of this sounds rational.
And yet. The issue tugs at me as an Asian-American, as a person with recent immigrant history. Our names are often fundamental parts of our identities. …
Recently, my white-presenting cousin (whose “normal” middle name, Colin, I had envied as a child) changed his middle name to Nakamura as well. He is one of several mixed Asian-Americans I know who have changed their names as adults. A friend’s brother dropped his father’s white-presenting last name, and uses his mother’s Japanese maiden name instead. He gave his daughter this last name as well. A Korean-American friend stopped using the “American” name she used growing up, and now only goes by her Korean name. We want to emphasize what in the past our ancestors often had to de-emphasize to mitigate overt racism. (When they emigrated to the United States in 1971, my Taiwanese ama changed my father’s name, Ching Kuo, to Charles. “Was it because the names sound similar?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said, “and because he is a king.”) For my generation, however, discrimination against ethnic-sounding or “hard-to-pronounce” names still exists. We see our names as a type of cultural preservation.
My family left Japan 112 years before my daughter was born.
And so forth and so on.
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