What's behind a name?

“What’s your name?”

What a weird question to be asked by someone you knew so incredibly well. Blindsided, I paused for a second and asked her another question before answering her initial one:

“Which name are you looking for?”

We both laughed and I instantly knew that she got it.

We’ve known each other since we were kids from the international French school in Hanoi. She had been there since as long as she could remember, while I arrived in the middle of fifth grade from Geneva, Switzerland, where my parents had just finished their term as Vietnamese diplomats. We met then in class and almost instantly became friends.

First by default and, as we grew up, by choice.

The differences were remarkable not just between the two countries, Vietnam and Switzerland, which at that point, I had grown to know both quite well. Culturally speaking, I noticed immediately upon setting foot in class on my first day that I was no longer the minority in many ways. I was no longer the rare Asian kid spotted in class among the majority white classmates that I had. But most importantly, I was no longer the rare Asian kid spotted in class who was experiencing and carrying a mixture of cultures— the French and the Vietnamese one — simultaneously.

I knew then that the other Vietnamese-born kids were going through the same drill as I did and somehow that knowledge made me feel a kind of solidarity that I did not always feel prior to enrolling in the international French school in my hometown, Hanoi. And just like that, I started my life over.

The first element that changed was the way that I was called.

My parents named me Thanh Thu* when I was born, a Vietnamese name that means “delicate princess”. It is a very beautiful name, though it is exactly the opposite of my personality. The way it sounds in Vietnamese is very light and flowy. It had always made me feel very calm and composed. My family name, on the other hand, is “Tran”. The Vietnamese “Tr” sound makes it much heavier and the grave accent on it makes the sound land pretty firmly once pronounced. My full name “Tran Thanh Thu” is, for me, a perfect example of a well-balanced name: heavy and light, solemn and playful. All at the same time.

But while I was living in the Switzerland, I was never called by my first name “Thanh Thu” because it was too complicated for Swiss people— especially kids— to pronounce. So while living in Geneva, I was called by my last name, “Tran”, instead. It didn’t bother me because I was too young to be bothered by anything related identity-related. I was too young to understand the weight and importance that was packed in a simple name: Mere sounds at first, that later carried meanings and identities. And in my case, solid and concrete memories of different periods of my life.

Yes — as weird as this sounds, I've had different names throughout my life and depending on the way that people called me, I know exactly which phase of my life I met them. “Tran” was my Swiss toddler identity. The few friends that I have kept contact with from that period of my life still call me the same way. And despite the decades that have slipped in between the me-then and the me-now, I still feel the same warmth and familiarity whenever I hear that name pronounced. I still feel some kind of belonging in that simple sound that used to be my name. Especially when it was pronounced by Swiss gap-toothed kids. Only when it was pronounced by this kind of foreigner. Oddly enough, the not quite correct pronunciation was that space where I felt entirely home. Entirely me.

When I moved back to Vietnam, the friends and people that I met there called me “Thanh Thu”, some with the perfect Vietnamese accent and others with a typical foreign one — that of a French person with the basic understanding of Vietnamese tonality but still with the inability to produce such sounds. While living in Vietnam, I always noticed these two almost different designations being used interchangeably. In fact, when we would be hanging out together— French, Vietnamese and all the other different nationalities combined — everyone referred to me as “Tanh Tu” with the French accent.

Including my Vietnamese friends — who spoke fluent French and was very French themselves in many ways. Almost instinctively, they inherited the French accent while pronouncing a Vietnamese name with effortless ease. A friend could be calling me “Thanh Thu” with the perfect Vietnamese “-Th” sound or simply “Tanh Tu”, the French way, with an aspirated “h”, and it would all sound the same to me. And oddly enough, somehow, in that little international world of ours, these differences made perfect sense. Both were my names and I identified strongly with them.

Moving from Hanoi to San Francisco was a totally different battle, mostly because I loved my life in the French school in Vietnam. I loved my friends, my school, my house. But also because I was at the age of fifteen and had just started to discover myself. Or, more accurately, the multi-facets of the self that I understood to be me. And just like that, my parents uprooted me again and dropped me off, this time, in a public school in San Francisco within a span of two weeks. Within those fourteen days, many things in my life changed: a city, a country, a continent. Friends, books, buildings. Language was a huge one. My parents, for some reasons, merely thought that since French and English were western languages, I would have no problem learning English since I already spoke French.

What a reality distortion.

But with time, I did learn English. With effort, I did find my crew. But it didn’t come easily to me this time around because although I was surrounded by Asians in my new public school, they were Asian Americans while I was just Asian from the French school in Hanoi. I didn’t necessarily find the solidarity that I felt when I was still a student at the Ecole Fran?aise Alexandre Yersin. I didn’t find the same reference points that I once had. And there, too, I had to start over.

Almost like a tradition now, I had a new name. This happened mostly because Americans didn’t use middle names, so I automatically became “Thu Tran”, which never felt right to me. Maybe because I was never in contact with the American culture before that, but the Americans pronounced my name in a way that I had never heard before. The light Vietnamese “Th” sound was— for some reasons that I fail to understand until this day— transformed into the “ch” sound and I now became “Chu Tran”. This bizarre name was too similar to both the train whistle sound (chu chu!) and the sound of “ching chong”, a pejorative term used to mock Asian people that I had learned when I moved to the States. Needless to say, I didn’t relate at all to it.

To solve the issue, I did what I thought was the most American experiment to inaugurate my new life: I went to Starbucks and tested different names out at the counter. It felt so new and exhilarating for me the act of going to grab coffee in the most quintessential American establishment and trying out different characters on myself to see which one fitted best. One day I was Rosa but I soon discarded this name because it made me think too much of Rose from Titanic. And that definitely did not fit my personality. Other days I went by something else. And this experiment carried on every single time that I would go to Starbucks for a coffee, which was very often. And then one day an old name came back to haunt me. That name was “Ella” a character that I invented in one of the writing classes that I had back in the French school. Was it my unconscious nostalgia? I guess I would never know.

“What’s your name?” the Starbucks staff asked me after taking my order.

“Ella,” I confidently answered him, without any pause or hesitation. In my head, I was actually Ella because even though she was a small fictional character in my previous French writing class, I invented her and thus she was a part of me. I think back to all the French authors who wrote masterpieces and created such complex characters and identities. These characters and identities came from somewhere deep down within the soul of its authors, its creators. I could now say the same. I could now feel the same.

Ella and I are one and the same.

I snapped back to reality. She laughed as our conversation had dragged out a good thirty minutes too long just so I can fully explain my relationships with the different names that I have learned to respond to and ones that I have consciously created.

“Wait until I ask you where you are from, then you won’t stop talking,” she teased me through the Google Meet that served to connect the two of us. People who were so close mentally but so far physically. And this long distance relationship has characterized the majority of our friendship. I think about all the different versions of me that she had met, whether it was the competitive Vietnamese-Swiss kid that once was her classmate, the fresh-off-the-boat Vietnamese girl who existed in San Francisco, the passionate hustler in New York, the startup marketer in Vietnam or the number-oriented accountant that I am now today in Canberra. She had met them all. She had called me all of the different names that I have had in my life and maybe I was wrong all along, maybe the sound of the name didn’t matter as much, but the voice that called it.

“Where are you from, person?” she joked as now she wasn’t sure which name to use to call me anymore. Since she has seen me in all of my stages, I don’t blame her confusion and hesitation even for a split second. This must also be confusing for the people around me as well, I told myself.

“Hanoi, Vietnam,” I answered self-assuredly, a hint of pride ran through me fiercely.

“That sounds quite conflictive in my Vietnamese ears,” she told me, “Ella from Hanoi.” She flashed me a smile. A familiar one.

“No, I don’t think so,” I disagreed with her without giving her much of an explanation. I knew that she understood this way too well.

“Do you fully identify with the Vietnamese culture, then?” she insisted.

“No, not at all, you silly,” I answered “How can we ever, really?”

“So how can you answer ‘Vietnam’ with such confidence?” she retorted while looking at me straight in the eyes.

“I’m just being pragmatic,” I confessed and proceeded in explaining to her that ever since moving to the Western world in my more mature age, I understood that the question “Where are you from?” was not so much related to my passport country or nationality but much more to my Asian looks. And I was cool with that because I sincerely didn’t feel like I fully belonged to any of these Western countries really anyways.

“I guess belonging to people is enough ,” she added as if to console the both of us.

I nodded in agreement with her because I had told her over and over again that she was my time capsule, my mobile home.

How wonderful to know that a piece of home was just a click away!