My Name is Yoon

This story illustrates the challenges that a newly immigrated Korean girl, Yoon, faces as she moves to America.  None of her classmates can pronounce her given name, a name which means "Shining Wisdom."  They chuckle.  To her aesthetic sensibilities (and mine), her name also looks much more appealing to her written in Korean than in it does in English.  It Korean it looks like dancing figures, or possibly a snowboarder.  In English it's just empty circles and lines.

윤  vs Yoon

 Pressured to adopt the clunky Anglicization of her name, Yoon experiments with other names like "bird" and "cat" and "cupcake."  In the end, she comes to accept both her English name and her new American self, recognizing that however it is written, she is still Yoon

While this text was moderately simplistic, it opened up a valuable conversation, both philosophically, socially, and historically about the importance of our names and preserving a sense of one's own self identity.

Philosophically, we explored the meaning of names, borrowing from Juliet's famous question: "What's in a name?"

Historically, we explored Jewish naming customs and we looked at the history of forcible renaming that occurred in Native American boarding schools.  In an effort to Anglicize the young Native Americans, the U.S. Government forcibly took them from their parents, placing them in boarding schools.  They were forbidden from speaking their native languages, wearing native clothing, or using their given names.  They were forcibly assimiliated (or culturally changed).  Their identities were yanked out of their hands and changed.

This fact inspired us to talk about the value of preserving the elements we each possess that make us unique, rather than attempting to change ourselves to suit someone else's notion of what we should be.

Photo 1: Chiricahua Apache's from Geronimo's band as they arrived at a boarding school in 1887. Photo 2: 4 months later after the assimilation process began to take hold. 



 
     
 

Links:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/03/names-and-wages
http://www.uscis.gov/history-and-genealogy/genealogy/genealogy-notebook/immigrant-name-changes
http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/images/KohnovalskyCohn.jpg
http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/images/ZakotskyShukowsky.jpg