Call Us By Our Names by Kate Lu Sedor

When I was about five years old, I stopped calling my mother’s dad “goong-goong.” “Grandpa” was what grandfathers were called on TV, how characters referred to their elders in books, what the kids at school called their own family members — so I decided that I would, too.

The first time I called him “grandpa” to his face, my grandfather blinked at me in confusion. It was perhaps the fifth or tenth or hundredth time I addressed him as such that his mouth scrunched into something between a frown and a pucker of disgust, a twist of resignation in the line of his lips. It became one more indignity he had to suffer since immigrating from Guangzhou to America, and like every past blow, he bore the weight of it in silence.

Before he was my grandpa, he was my goong-goong, the Cantonese epithet attached to a child’s maternal grandfather. This had been the name I used to get his attention, to tell him I was hungry, to let him know how school had gone that day. I don’t remember what precipitated the switch in what I called him, whether it was a classmate’s open taunting or a flicker of dismissal on a teacher’s face — Must be a Chinese thing — or just some unarticulated, sinking realization that how I addressed my grandfather was different from how most other children I knew addressed theirs. I was never explicitly told that calling him goong-goong was strange or bad, or that it set me apart from everyone else. A series of observations, drawn from media consumption, playground bullying, and unspoken peer pressure clicked into place in my developing brain one day in kindergarten: I was wrong and, therefore, I needed to change.

I never called him goong-goong again.

***

Every Chinese American kid enters into adulthood saddled with stories of assimilation, their person thinned out by the constant tug between one culture and another, afraid that through their translucent skin, they will look inside and find they are made up of nothing at all: no organs to anchor them, no thoughts to move them forward, just moist air in an empty shell, all of it threatening to collapse. For the longest time, I thought that I wasn’t just empty — that I was, in fact, a black hole, consuming every scrap of the two cultures I straddled while reflecting nothing. Not just the absence of light, but the destruction of it.

Did it start when my grandfather crossed the Pacific, a months-long journey that only landed him in a city full of pale, hate-filled faces? Did it start when his elder daughter, my mother, proved unable to speak the language of his ancestors without an American accent? Did it start when she found herself in an arranged marriage to my father, a man ten years her junior who had only ever known Guangzhou, before the roads of his village — my grandfather’s village — were paved, before the Chinese government forcibly moved his family into the heart of Guangdong’s chief megacity?

Or perhaps it simply started with me, delivered into this world with a Chinese face and a Western name, a collapsed star all on my own.

***

My name is Kate (not Katherine), a name with origins in ancient Greece, often considered the cradle of the Western world. BabyNames.com tells me Kate means “purity,” a fact that never fails to make friends laugh, because I swear worse than a sailor and have a petty streak approximately the width of the Mississippi River. My mother chose it for no reason other than that she liked it, and certainly liked it better than her father’s choice, Ellen, a designation I would later discover was given to dozens of other Chinese American girls born in the early ’90s — so many that it has become its own cliché.

Given this context, my Chinese name is almost as funny: Feng Ai, I’ve been told, translates roughly to “beautiful bird,” a reference to the mythical phoenix. Written in traditional script, my name contains the hanzi character for “love,” a sentiment flung across the world by my father’s parents, whom I would not meet until I was ten. My name was their first gift. Their wish for me, however, didn’t stick: Bombarded by waves of blonde hair, blue eyes, and statuesque proportions, I have never felt particularly beautiful. I was, instead, dark-haired and dark-eyed, a firebird of ashes, not flame. I spent my early years wishing to be taller, thinner, to have an eyelid crease and a pointier nose. I didn’t feel resilience, only resentment for my genetics.

Many Chinese American parents use their children’s Chinese names as middle names, and each time I meet someone for whom this is the case, I feel a spark of jealousy that is quickly subsumed in a surge of guilt. My middle name, like my first name, is Western, in honor of my mother’s sister, who became the woman who raised me. Most of the time, I’m glad she is part of me in such a visible way. But sometimes, all I want is for the other part of me — the part not rooted here on stolen land, the part that often calls my heart across the sea to a continent I’ve never visited — to mark me, to name me in a language I have never learned to speak.

***

For much of my life, my name was a subject of ridicule, even growing up in the heart of American diversity that is New York City. Too short to be imposing, but short enough to ease the passage of taunts from the mouths of childhood bullies, the two words together, “Kate Lu,” became an object of my own hatred and frustration from almost the moment I started school.

Teachers asked me: “Just Kate?”

Kids on the playground interrogated me: “Lu? That’s it? What is that?”

Even close friends questioned: “Not Katherine?”

As if those six letters weren’t enough. As if I weren’t enough.

The small advantage I had when filling out my name on standardized tests — six graphite bubbles scattered across a Scantron grid, neatly finished while my classmates were still furiously scribbling — didn’t seem worth it to me in the face of so many other indignities, large and small, that threatened to crunch me down until there was nothing left.

It wasn’t just the harassment: It was the asterisk that had to be added to the end of “Lu” when I bought my first cell phone plan as an adult, because the registration system required a minimum of three characters for the last name field; it was the way others wanted to pin on me that tired stereotype of the small, submissive Asian female, and the sweet vowel sounds of my short name betrayed me, played right into the ill-fitting trope; it was the expression on interviewers’ faces when I applied for jobs, the raised eyebrows that still said to me, years after all the teasing that followed me from elementary to middle to high school: “Is that really all there is?”

The only thing worse than living with my name was having it taken away from me.

To this day, by far the most common misreading of my first name involves adding an extra letter, an extra syllable, transforming it into “Katie,” a nickname I despise for the way it makes me smaller, a diminutive layered on top of all the others I’ve acquired throughout my life. As much as I hate when people make this mistake, it is, however, at least understandable: It’s a common enough nickname, and so many women happily go by Katie. And as irritating as this gaffe is, it is far from being the worst I’ve encountered.

In my final year of high school, I entered a national contest celebrating young artists under the age of eighteen. Several months after submitting entries for fiction writing and photography, I found out I had won honors for both. It seems like such a small thing now, over a decade later, but at the time, the prizes felt like proof that someone who looked like me — someone with my name — could be an artist. I thought that recognition from a group of mostly white judges anointed me in a way, made me fit to ascend to the ranks of those great, mostly white writers whose books I’d read in school.

My mother and I arrived to the ceremony late, a result of her chronic underestimation of how much time she needed to get ready and a perfect storm of subway delays. My stomach ached with sharp anxiety as we walked into darkness, one spotlight shining on a woman giving introductory remarks. We scurried, mouse-like, to separate seats: my mother at the back, myself cringing as I shuffled past other seated winners to an empty spot smack in the middle of the student section. I tried to calm my upset insides, slid my sweaty palms beneath my thighs. We had made it just in time for the woman on stage to start calling each honoree’s name, inviting them to walk across the stage, accept a gold-embossed certificate, and shake hands. My heart pounded as I waited out the alphabet, watching each person before me walk up one side of the platform and back down the other. When the woman called my name, my heart stopped.

Because I wasn’t entirely sure she had said my name.

“Kah-tay Loo-ee,” she stumbled, furrowing her brow at the list of names she held.

I didn’t move for what felt like years. My brain slowed to a crawl, like dregs of honey dripping off a spoon, and my thoughts congealed into a sticky ball. I could only gape, wordless.

When I did get up, my entire body felt numb. My leaden legs carried me down the row of seats, up the aisle and the stairs to the stage. I gave the woman who had butchered my name a limp handshake before taking the piece of paper she handed me and returning to my seat. I’m not sure whether I was truly present in my body. I don’t remember what happened afterward, the keynote speech, my mother’s confusion after the ceremony because she hadn’t heard my name, the train ride home.

Someone who I hoped had seen me had instead seen my last name, determined it was not European in origin, and delivered the most “exotic” pronunciation of it she could — and in doing so, she’d erased me so utterly, my own mother hadn’t been able to find me, dark matter swallowed up by a dark room.

***

About ten years after the incident at the awards ceremony, an acquaintance of mine asked me to join him on a panel that was to be presented at the local pop culture convention. The topic — diversity and minority representation in the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises — interested me, so I agreed.

I didn’t know anyone else on stage except for my acquaintance, which made me apprehensive, but all of the panelists considered themselves activists: two queer white folks; one queer, Black, disabled cosplayer; one West Asian person; and myself, an East Asian femme. On the day we were to present, I found myself excited to discuss with the panelists a subject so close to my heart. As we all chatted on stage before the session started, I began to feel more comfortable.

When the panel started, the moderator, a white woman, asked us to introduce ourselves in turn. After I gave my name and explained my role on my podcast, the moderator added: “And I love her Rose Tico costume!” She was referring to a character relatively new to Star Wars portrayed by Kelly Marie Tran, a Vietnamese-American actor who was hounded for months by racist fans who did not want to see a character with her face in a series of movies featuring heavily white casts.

The compliment nailed me to my seat. I could feel acutely the eyes of the other panelists and the audience members on my face, waiting for my response. The lights of the stage, I hoped, would provide a good excuse for my flushed face — although what I had to be embarrassed about, I still don’t know, because I wasn’t the one who had made a mistake.

The moderator had. Because I had no Rose Tico costume. She was thinking of a completely different Asian person, one whom I, in fact, knew. A fairly well-known pop culture writer, my friend had been posting herself in costume on social media, showing her enthusiasm for Kelly Marie Tran’s character, and drumming up excitement about the casting choice.

Sitting on that convention stage, my soul separated from a body I had so often despised, I found only a weak “Thanks” leaving my mouth. I was too shocked, too hurt, too betrayed to correct this woman on a public stage, on a panel that was supposed to be dedicated to respecting diversity.

My absolute horror was reflected in the slack-jawed expression of my acquaintance, who was sitting between me and the moderator. He also knew that the moderator had gotten the Wrong Asian.

I wish the moderator’s mistake had ended there, but it didn’t. She referred to the character of Rose Tico often as an example of racism in fandom, and at one point asked me point-blank, “Have you ever gotten any negative reactions to your costume?”

Stuck now in the charade, I could only reply, “No, I’ve never heard from anyone about the costume.”

Afterward, I found a quiet corner of the convention hall, sat down hard on the nubbly carpet, and cried until I felt hollow.

***

Even when I am allowed my identity — my own name, my own culture, my own claim to being ABC (American-born Chinese) — often, it is only within the confines of what others expect from me.

I walk in the footsteps of other Chinese American writers who blazed a trail before me. Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston — these are the giants who cast their long shadows over every word I commit to paper, every sentence I so carefully construct. They are the women who first captured the experience of being a daughter of the Chinese diaspora, who found themselves torn between two continents, who themselves caught the coveted attention of even the white reader. They feel like eyes upon my back, whether I like it or not.

I am grateful to them — I have to be. They are the ones who broke publishing barriers so I could even dream of writing in this language so foreign to my DNA, of seeing my work in print in this country. They are the ones whose names are hallowed simply by their being allowed into the American canon. And yet their umbrae, too, are a trap, a way for people, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, to confuse me for someone I am not.

When I was younger, I tried to write my way into whiteness. Subconsciously, I could create no other characters, because I had so rarely seen ones who looked like me. Every single one of those first attempts fell left flat on the page, no spark of life to round them out, not when I had nothing within me to give them, nothing that could connect myself to their privileged, albeit fictional, experience.

Later, I tried to write my way into what I thought was Chinese-ness, with narratives about being caught between two countries, two languages, two cultures when, in reality, I had never been to China, could not speak a lick of Cantonese, felt more excited as a child about Thanksgiving and Christmas than Lunar New Year.

But those were the trappings of being ABC, the things I expected to see in fiction by Chinese-American writers. They became the things I expected of my own work, even as I represented a different way of being diasporic: an American who just happened to have a Chinese face.

Writing could not make me white, and it could not give me a direct genetic line to Wong, or Tan, or Hong Kingston. I had to compose my way out of these boxes, light dark paths with a starburst of letters all my own.

When I tell people I write speculative fiction, an answer I often get is, “Like sci-fi?” It’s a reaction I’m not sure I will ever tire of, because it creates space for me to explain my work, to talk about what I’m interested in: my heritage, yes, but also social inequity, environmental collapse, the dark side of the promise of science.

But just as often, when people learn I’m a writer, they will ask, “Have you ever read Amy Tan?” I have learned in those moments — when my anger threatens to bubble over, to spill from my lips in the form of renumerating every instance of writerly oppression I’ve ever experienced, including this one — to drop the slight into the wormhole in my mind, larger inside than it is without. Its dark innards contain the black tar of every hurt I want to forget.

***

Six letters have marked me for most of my life — and in many ways, they still do, although in different ways.

After I got married, I turned my surname, my father’s family name, into an additional middle name, and took my husband’s last name. I did it because after a lifetime of loathing my name, I didn’t feel a particular attachment to “Lu.” I did it because my husband’s last name is longer by an exciting three letters — two whole syllables! — and I longed for something, anything, to balance out the smallness of a name I’d had for twenty-five years. I did it because the seeming incongruity between my last name and my face often causes confusion in strangers, and I have always derived an acerbic kind of joy from upending expectations.

But I haven’t been without my doubts about the decision, even now, years after I filled out so many forms, waited in so many lines, forked over so much money in fees, just to play an odd four-card monte with my name.

Before my wedding, when I told my friends I was changing my name, some raised their eyebrows, glanced at each other out of the corners of their rapidly blinking eyes, their lips twitching, all of it adding up to confusion, to a muted disapproval. My decision to take my husband’s name, I suppose, didn’t feel politically correct to them, didn’t fall in line with modern feminist ideals, made me suspect in their eyes. For others in my community, I have no doubt my name change felt like a betrayal. Asian women have long fielded anger and hatred from within and without their diasporic communities for marrying outside of their race and ethnicity. My white husband and my new name, combined with my unmovable Americanness, made me the ultimate traitor to my cultural origins. Such reactions weren’t unexpected. But as firm as I was in my decision, they did make me pause: Was I making the right choice? Was I betraying my roots — myself — by changing my name?

Even now, still and always trying to find my place in the global story of the Cantonese people, I sometimes wonder whether taking on the name of a white man was a mistake.

I have new problems now. People often have trouble pronouncing my current last name, and even more trouble spelling it: a strange shortening of a Polish surname that retained almost none of the original letters or sounds. I assume the person who invented it thought they were making things easier, but they have been proven thoroughly wrong.

Still, on most days, I don’t mind much. Perhaps that’s because I’ve built myself a sort of trapdoor, my own method of having it both ways: Although my legal last name is Sedor, I still publish under Lu.

Like that national writing award won so long ago, the first of my fiction to appear in print bore my unmarried name. After my wedding, it seemed silly to do anything differently, and besides, the vain part of me liked the idea of having “Kate Lu” on a book cover, short and crisp, hopefully memorable. More than that, I wondered: If I had seen more names like mine on dust jackets and spines, endpapers and author biographies, how much less torturous would my own writing journey have been? How much less pained would I feel now, still so often floundering around within the identity I have finally cobbled together over all these years?

I am a Chinese American writer. My name is Kate — and it is Elizabeth, and Lu, and Sedor. And I am all of those things. But far from my ancestors’ shimmering hope in the promise of American opportunity, am I a diffuse, diffracted legacy? Or am I a hybrid star: a theory suggesting the existence of something beyond what we imagined before?

Image Source: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / Flickr Creative Commons