Our high school’s virtuoso thespian cleared his throat. He crinkled his freckled face. Then he bellowed John Proctor’s desperate cry into the corners of the classroom.
“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies!”
Spellbound, our section of American Lit tensed in the delicate silence between lines.
“Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
Since then, that climactic scene from The Crucible—Arthur Miller’s chef-d'oeuvre about the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and 1693—has etched itself into my memory. Yet, what stood out to me wasn’t how much I enjoyed the play’s finale or my classmate’s immaculate performance.
What stood out to me then was that, while John Proctor fought so hopelessly to save his one name, I was already on my second.
The birth name my parents gave me is Jùnqiān, which translates roughly to “handsome” and “modest” in Mandarin. It’s a lofty standard to place on a child but guess what.
I delivered—
So many treasures in this photo. Upon seeing my D.A.R.E. t-shirt, my wife called me an “absolute narc.”
Jùnqiān wasn’t written on my birth certificate though; it’s 俊谦. Jùnqiān is the hanyu pinyin form, a system developed in the 1950’s to phonetically transcribe Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. While it can help in some instances, it didn’t help Americans pronounce my name. My pre-K and Kindergarten teachers in Boston, the city to which we’d immigrated when I was one year old, had immense trouble with Jùnqiān.
It’s understandable. Most of my teachers didn’t grow up speaking a tonal language and, unsurprisingly, Babbel recently rated Mandarin Chinese the hardest language to learn for English speakers1. (Try saying Jùnqiān on for size. If you’re feeling confident or curious, you can check your answer.) To avoid watching my teachers get tongue tied, I told them and other adults to just call me “Jun-Quin,” which was equally exotic but didn’t demand any oral gymnastics. So, by the time I could introduce myself to strangers, I had two identities: Jùnqiān and Jun-Quin, one Chinese and one American.
Around the age of seven, my parents and I discussed adopting an English name, something easier for “Americans” (our short-hand for white people) to pronounce. We eventually landed on Patrick. I don’t remember what the rationale was but I’d bet living in Boston was not an insignificant factor2. Go Celtics. Beat L.A.
My parents updated my paperwork to legally change my first name to Patrick. Jùnqiān became my middle name. Although my last name was still pretty Chinese, I was optimistic that having at least one English name was good enough.
Before second grade, we moved out of Boston into a nearby suburb. Our new neighbors, the Shays, had a son who was my age and they welcomed me in like I was one of their own. Newly minted with the confidence of Patrick: A Real American Boy, I hung out at the Shays’ all the time, finally getting a first-hand education on how to fluently navigate a white household and white spaces to go with my new name.
For instance, when I had dinner at the Shays’, the meal would be in pre-set portions, regardless of how much I wanted to eat, and served to me on plates with a table setting, which included a fork and knife. I used that knife to cut food into bite-sized portions then my fork would bring it all home. It’s motherhood and apple pie, right? Most people wouldn’t think twice but it was new for me.
My family didn’t just eat “family-style” with all the dishes in the middle. Chinese people also hold our bowl of rice in one hand, bring it up to our mouths, and use the chopsticks in the other hand to scoop food in. It’s a bit like slurping cereal milk except we’d do it in restaurants, not just at home in our pajamas. In American dining, picking up your vessel isn’t good “manners” and, courtesy of the Shays, I learned that early on.
A friend of mine, however, didn’t get the memo.
That friend, who was also Chinese American, came with me to a sleep-away camp in New Hampshire one summer. We were both in early middle school and, by then, we had normal names. We spoke English well. We got our clothes from Sears and K-Mart (did you see my jeans in that photo?). We watched Nickelodeon and read the Sunday funnies in the Globe. At dinner one of the first nights, we sat with a group of kids who seemed like they would be good camp friends.
Toward the end of the meal, there was a little food left on my friend’s plate, something like stray peas, something hard to pick up with silverware. So, rather than fumble around with his fork or try to use his fingers, his instinct was to pick up the plate, bring it to his mouth, and scoop the food in. Big mistake.
One of the other campers at our table, whom I hoped would be our friend, guffawed. “Look at this garbage dumpster,” he shouted, pointing with a pale crooked finger. Everyone laughed.
At that moment, it felt like my eyes suddenly got slantier. My face got flatter. I could feel my nose softening and my skin browning next to these kids with their alabaster pigments.
I didn’t defend my friend. Nor did I explain to this ignoramus that that’s how Chinese people eat (the plate notwithstanding). Instead, I pitied my friend for not having the wherewithal, for not having nice white neighbors teach him how to be. Instead of doing the right thing, I let these kids verbally stone my friend because I was afraid they would turn on me next. I was afraid the thin cover of my name and well-trained American manners would be blown too. This was silly, of course; it was never much of a cover in the first place.
Even when I played the part immaculately—insisting to my parents that I never bring lunch from home, speaking impeccable effing3 English, and exclusively going by Patrick—other kids in school nevertheless called me China Boy or Ching Chong. Despite my best efforts to assimilate, it didn’t matter. I needed more than a new name to emerge unscathed. I would have needed to be someone else entirely.
My immediate family calls me Pat4. My friends and coworkers call me some variation on Patrick. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s who I am. I’m also proud of my Chinese heritage, my family’s name, and of the life my parents built for me. It doesn’t mean though that my relationship with my name and my Chinese-ness aren’t complex and that it hasn’t cost me something to get here.
At thirty-two years old and much more race conscious than I was then, anxiety flickers when I introduce myself at work meetings or at church. Zhōu (周) remains my last name and it wasn’t until college that I started telling people that it’s pronounced more like “Joe” and not “Zow”5. For 18 years, because I was embarrassed, I let people call me something else, wanting to make it easier for them. Now, I’m ashamed that I was embarrassed in the first place and have been trying to walk it back ever since.
My name is both Patrick Junqian Zhou and 周俊谦.
Hear me roar.
After a year of rising anti-Asian violence propagated by demagogues during the COVID-19 pandemic, on March 16th, 2021, eight people were killed in the Atlanta area in a mass shooting. Six of the victims were Asian women and much has already been made of how news outlets have bungled their names. In 2013, when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash-landed, a local TV station fell victim to a prank from an NTSB intern who said the pilots’ names were “Sum Ting Wong” and “Wi Tu Lo.” This past October, the Chair of the Boston School Committee was caught on a hot mic mocking Asian names.
Obviously, this problem with names isn’t just an Asian problem. Immigrants of all kinds have been conscious of the prejudice their names might invoke in this new country and have tried, willingly and unwillingly, to adjust, accommodate, and assimilate in an adopted homeland. But it’s never been just about the names.
The underlying problem is a reflection of who our society chooses to center and who to other, as demonstrated in the words and actions of people who have power. Popular kids, teachers, media figures, pastors, policy-makers and the like have power. They wield implicit and explicit influence and can make people feel like neighbors or aliens, free to be themselves or buried in shame. They’re the ones telling the rest of us, and our children, who they think this country is for.
I need to repent of my own sins. In high school, when my fluency finally helped me climb the social ladder, I said horrid things to those I viewed as beneath me, despite having just been there at the bottom. Memory can be short, sometimes intentionally so, especially when it’s yoked with pain; this has worked against me. As I get older and accrue influence in my communities, it’s incumbent upon me to be watchful of that responsibility, to more keenly understand my personal history as well as the broader social milieu and how it affects my actions and my words.
If you read The Crucible in high school, then you know that the play isn’t about the Salem Witch Trials. Arthur Miller’s allegory was a snapshot of an America in tumult during the Second Red Scare. After World War II, the Soviets were on the rise and Mao’s Communist Party had won the Chinese Civil War against the U.S.-backed, pro-Democracy Kuomingtang.
Born in Harlem to a Polish-Jewish immigrant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright spoke about this historical backdrop in his 1996 New Yorker essay “Why I Wrote The Crucible”:
“I remember those years—they formed ‘The Crucible’’s skeleton—but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next...
Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his threat-shtick…
The Red Hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche.”
The not-so-veiled xenophobia of McCarthy’s tactics, and those who espoused them, was not lost on Miller either.
“McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had ‘lost China’ and would soon lose Europe as well… Indeed the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture—a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy’s head drop off.”
Ultimately, Miller, who had testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, conceded that his play was not just social and political. It was personal. “My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay,” Miller wrote, drawing the parallel between himself and John Proctor, whose affair with Abigail Williams precipitated the central conflict in the drama. “[Proctor] demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul.”
I too am an imperfect messenger. That much is clear in these two thousand words. After all, we are children of wrath and there are few saints to be found when exhuming our personal histories, much less our nation’s (as far back as, say, Massachusetts Bay Colony). However, this does not absolve us from doing the hard work of repentance; on the contrary, our unambiguous blemishes necessitate it.
Since you probably weren’t in my high school English class, here’s three-time Oscar-winning Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis in a role my wife calls “A Very Hot John Proctor,” delivering the iconic finale to The Crucible:
With the cry of his whole soul, Proctor tries to salvage his name. But as any sophomore with access to SparkNotes will tell you, Proctor’s name wasn’t just what kids called him in gym class. Names bear with them reputations, identities, and legacies. Savaging or replacing them is no small matter. Names are heirlooms.
In moving to a city just twenty miles from Salem, my parents left behind an increasingly oppressive regime in China with the hope of forging a freer future and a better home. Yet, it meant leaving behind their family, their language, their food, and the soil of their ancestors. They left behind everything they ever knew.
Make no mistake, people do give this country their souls.
Leave them their names.
I don’t like how this ranking feels a tad like a competition. Also, for the record, a friend of mine is Cambodian-American and whenever she tries to teach me something in Khmer I can tell I’m not just mangling it, I’m running it over with a steamroller and lighting it on fire. Khmer should make this list.
One time, when I was in high school, I was filling up gas and the man at the register saw my name on my credit card and asked me how I got a nice Irish name like “Patrick”. I laughed it off, told him that I didn’t know, paid, and drove away.
Hi Mom!
A confession and an irony. My parents scarcely called me Jùnqiān. When I was growing up, they called me another cutesier Chinese nickname growing up. So did my relatives. I didn’t hear Jùnqiān that often from anyone.
“Joe” is still a compromise but it’s close enough for me. Asking people to pronounce it correctly felt like a risky order because botching your tone might be the difference between calling me by my last name or calling me “elbow.” There are worse mistakes to make. Other people, of course, may feel differently about how you ought to handle their names. Listen to them, please.