Your name. It’s the most fundamental form of identification you can receive from your parents from the day you are born. It is also the most important part of your personality with which you are known by. Without it, you become nothing but another face in the crowd. Hi, my name is Caetlyn McLean and this is my story. 

I come from a very traditional Asian family and my parents picked my name from a poem written by one of the greatest poets in Chinese history, Li Bai. The poem, according to my parents, was one of his most famous called “Quiet Night Thoughts”. Hence, my name literally translated to “Forest of Tranquillity”. While its meaning is very pleasant in English, the Anglicised version of my name provided any Westerner with enough ammunition for insults and ridicule. You may well be thinking, “what name could cause so much angst in an individual?”. What my parents failed to realise was that naming a child in an Asian society created a very different reaction to one in a Western society.

If fact, if I had to be completely honest with myself, I would go as far to admit that my parents were (and quite possibly, still are) perfect examples of Asian superiority. My parents could have, if they really wanted to, made things easier on my upbringing by providing me with a Western name yet still keeping the Asian one I had. I have no doubt that hospital staff would have provided them with that option. However, my parents, being who they were, would have insisted that my birth name be an Asian one and that would have been that. My “Western” name ended up being just an anglicised pronunciation of my birth name.

Unfortunately, my birth name not only was a very traditional sounding name but also sounded very much like a rhyming adjective. That may have sounded perfectly normal to the ears of someone who was raised in the Orient. However, for a child being born and growing up in the UK during the mid-1970s, this provided other children with perfect name-calling opportunities, least because the name sounded so foreign to them.

Most Asian names don’t have a middle name, especially those of Chinese descent. Like many other Chinese children, my name was written in two parts and both names were considered to be my first names. Of course, this caused a few issues while living in the UK, and consequently Australia. In the written form, it was initially taken for granted. However, as I approached my teenage years, the written form was often slowly shortened to comprise of just the first half of the name. This may seem like a trivial matter for a Western person. After all, every person’s name is shortened to make it easier for others to remember.

What most of my peers made the mistake of doing was assuming my first half of my name was the first name and the second my middle name. What made the assumption even worse was the fact the first half of my name sounded by the sound of a piece of metal dropping, which in turn give classmates even more name-calling ammunition. The most unfortunate part about the first half of my birth name was that it could have also been part of a derogatory slur used against Asians by their western counterparts.

Due to my Asian name, many assumptions were thrown around regarding my place of birth. It appeared to be a natural assumption that someone of my appearance with my name would be born in a particular part of the world. I still remember quite clearly being asked by a proudly racist individual which Asian country I was born in. Thankfully, I took great pleasure in informing them I was born in the UK, leaving them literally speechless.

This ridicule seemed be constant in many different forms. Even as a child growing up in Singapore, my Asian classmates would tease me because the name sounded very much like the title of the well-known Christmas carol, Jingle Bells. As a teenager, I was subjected to more humiliating name calling while, as an adult, my colleagues were constantly leaving out the second half of my name in work rosters and continually call me by the first half of the name despite my corrections.

I still remember quite clearly being called by the first half of my name by a university lecturer who constantly ignored my requests to be called by the full name. This was partly due to the way the name was written so, in the interim, I made the decision to hyphenate the name despite the fact it wasn’t the name on my birth certificate. It got to the stage that I was so tired of correcting other people’s mistakes and assumptions that I decided to completely have my name legally changed to avoid any future mistakes. I have since had very little issues with name calling.

In case you are wondering, no, I will not indulge you with the name of my birth. I no longer wish to be remembered or known by that name because it has bought me nothing but trouble – even by my Asian counterparts.