What's in a name?

Lam. Lamb. Lam, without the b. Lambchop. Lamikins. Lambert the Friendly Lion. Lamborghini. Laminator. Laminex.

It’s both a blessing and a curse, a name such as Lam. It’s short, easy to remember, and a breeze to pronounce. It’s also easy to make a nickname out of (see above) or make it part of a saying (to be ‘on the lam’; lamb to the slaughter; Mary had a little lamb; Little Bo Peep and her lamb, gentle as a lamb, mutton dressed as lam, ). There’s even a psychological thriller film about my silence.

In Vietnamese, it means forest (I’m told that in Mandarin, the similar surname Lim has a similar meaning). The ‘a’ in Lam is not the usual ‘a’, but is ‘â’, which is pronounced more like a short ‘u’. So Lam is really Lum.

My other two names present more challenges. Nguyễn, the most-distinctive Vietnamese surname, is easy to recognise but hard to pronounce. In Vietnamese, it’s almost a one and a half syllable, with NGU - sounding mostly like a ‘ng-w’, Y sounding like the vowel, ‘i’, and the ỄN ‘more like an ‘n’, pronounced together as quickly as you can with a down-up inflection. Explaining it is almost as difficult as saying it, for someone not familiar with it.

In Vietnamese, it has the meaning of king or ruler, possibly because a dynasty of kings in Vietnam were of the Nguyen family, and made half of the population take on the name. That is why that other Nguyen is not my brother or my cousin, and might not even be related to me at all. (That other Nguyen though, is my sister or cousin - duh).

Hoàng is my middle name. The ‘oa’ is a difficult dipthong, because it either is one syllable (throat) or two syllables (boa). In Hoang, it sounds like one syllable (most words in Vietnamese are really just one syllable), but the one syllable is really a very quick version of the two syllables, as in Ho-ang. Somehow, most people read it is Hong, completely missing the a. Hoang has several meanings, including meaning 'phoenix', as well as yellow, derived from the Mandarin word for yellow, Huang.

Complicating my name is that, legally, my first name is Hoang and my middle name is Lam. The story behind this is that in Vietnamese, names are in the order of surname, middle name, and finally, first name (Nguyen Hoang Lam). When my Vietnamese birth certificate was translated into English, the interpreters knew that Nguyen was my surname. This was either because it was well known as a surname, or that they knew that it was the surname that came first.

I’m thinking the former, because having recognised that Nguyen was my surname, the translation proceeded as if the next name was my first name, as if it was Surname, First Name, Middle Name. My parents were none the wiser, and lo and behold, it wasn’t until I applied for my driver’s licence that I discovered that my legal name was not the same as my given name.

I have kept that legal name ever since, never bothering to change it. Changing your name may be a big thing for your identity, but I guess correcting your name should be a simple matter. In Thailand, I had friends who changed their names because a fortune teller told them that it was unlucky for them to have their name on the day of their wedding. It appears to work for me, and I just have to use my full legal name when I sign legal documents. But leaving it, and not correcting it, reveals something about me. My tendency to accept the status quo as presented to me, without the strong urge to correct it or realign it with my needs. I don’t think it troubles me here, but it is symbolic of one of my flaws.

It’s a funny thing, a name. It’s the name given to me by my parents, and it’s what everyone calls me. After all the malicious name calling, the terms of endearment, and the mispronunciations and mistranslations, the name did not own me. At some point in my life, I owned the name, and had the power to change it. It was me, but it was not all of me. It is just another jigsaw piece of me.

In trying to piece together these jigsaw pieces, I’m noticing huge gaping holes in my identity, and one of that is my Vietnamese identity. It’s something I’m going to explore further, and document here in monthly posts.