“When I’m older, I’m going to change my name.” My Dora-the-Explorer bob bounced up and down as I exclaimed my plans to my mom. She looked down at my eager face, and asked me “why would you want to do that?”
I was tired of watching teachers squint their eyes and furrow their brows as they stared at my last name on the roster. Everyone else at my 90.6% white elementary school (in a suburb of Houston called West University, where every street is named after a college) had surnames like “Raymond” or “Patterson.” They sounded pretty to me, like the name of a movie star or a girl in a poem. I wanted one.
Variety recently spotlighted how actress Chloe Bennet used to be Chloe Wang. Like me, her father is Chinese and her mother is white. She currently stars on Marvel’s “Agents of SHIELD,” and said that she changed her name to pay her rent. “Hollywood is racist and wouldn’t cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable.”
I have always felt distanced from my Chinese heritage. My dad was born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia (the only other Asian family was the owner of the only Chinese restaurant in his town), he never learned to speak Mandarin (besides the words poop and pee, which my grandma taught her kids to use in public whenever they had to go to the bathroom), and my grandparents lived 1,600 miles from me growing up. Whenever I would visit them, my grandma and I would often make a batch of two hundred dumplings together, and my grandpa would sometimes tell me stories about his mother, but that was the short extent of my connection to them. I grew up under the persisting misconception that American names are white names. I often felt like my name wasn’t truly representative of me—I felt labeled as something I was not.
In 1952, my grandpa stared at the immigration form, contemplating how to translate his Chinese name (胡) to English characters. He was a grumpy man who loved his family and diligently limited his dessert-intake. He also went to college in Taiwan, and there he learned that the “wh-“ sound is spelled with a “/hw/.” So logically, as opposed to the typical English spelling of “Hu,” he wrote down H-W-U.
And so it stands that my last name is “Hwu,” but pronounced “Who” like in “Who are you?” Common mispronunciations of “Hwu” include but are not limited to: Wu, Hue, and Ha-woo (my favorite). My dad is a doctor—he is, in fact, the Asian reincarnation of BBC’s Dr. Who. My mom gets the most confused stares when people encounter her and her name. A blonde pale woman with the last name Hwu? What an anomaly!
Names are your first impression of someone. They are labels and lineage and litmus tests. They are the sounds and shapes that encapsulate everything you are. When I was 7-years-old, I wanted a name that bloomed with uniqueness and potential, a name that could be molded into an actress or entrepreneur. Instead, my name felt short and small, like if I squinted too hard it would disappear.
In middle school, I went through a phase where I desperately wanted to act in commercials (“I could sell Mood Sand just as well as her!”) Being the wonderful woman she is, my mom swiftly set me up with film acting lessons and helped me make an audition reel and résumé to send to agencies. I still remember my bubbling excitement as I licked the envelopes shut—I felt so confident that something good would come from my hard work. After waiting hopefully and impatiently for weeks, one of the agencies finally mailed back. I tore open the letter and was greeted by: “Thank you for your submission, but we will not be able to accept you at this time. Our agency strives for diversity, and our talent pool already has too many others like you.”
I thought nothing of it at the time, sliding the paper into the trash with not so much as a shrug and a sigh. Now, I wonder if the letter would have been different had I pulled a Chloe-Bennet and submitted my application under Emily Hughes. Admittedly, I may have simply just been a mediocre actor who would have made a poor Moon-Sand salesgirl anyways—there’s no real way of knowing what could have been.
And granted, my name was never at all the bane of my existence. I was never teased or put to shame or knowledgeably excluded for my race (like too many are), only inconvenienced and a bit confused. As one’s name often does, my name eventually became a sound that I could no longer understand after repeating it so many times. So as I got older, it became a neutral piece of my identity.
It was only when I got to college that I began to love my name. My family group-text is called “Hwufam,” and in times when I miss them immensely, my name, scribbled on forms or breathed out through my lips, is a reminder of them. I love that my name ties me to them. I love that my name starts conversations with strangers (“Emily Who? Emily Hwu! I bet you get that a lot.” “Yeah, I do,” I reply with a polite chuckle but a genuine smile). I love that my full name is typical at the beginning and interesting by the end (Emily was the #1 first name for newborns every year from 1996 to 2007. Hwu is the #86,950 “most common” last name in the USA, according to some random website). I love that my name contains a whole half of my heritage—a history that I wish I had been more curious about when my grandparents were still alive, but a history that I am beginning to piece together through faded photos and kind relatives. I love that my name was my grandpa’s mistake.
Maybe one day I’ll get married to a person with a perfectly polished surname like Patterson. Or maybe I’ll be up for a competitive job at a company with a historically-white executive board and I’ll be tempted to strategically alter how my identity is displayed on my résumé. But no matter what I choose to do with my name, I’ll always hold “Hwu” close to my heart—three letters that remind me of everything I love.
I know that many Americans struggle with, or are impartial to, their names. I hope that more people can realize that their names are beautiful—sounds and shapes that we should cherish, despite the preconceptions and opinions of others. Or, like Chloe Bennet said, “I hope that more people can fight for representation so no one else has to change their name.”