A Rose By Any Other Name

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By Angela MacKenzie

As a shy and brainy kid growing up in Toronto, I would go to great lengths to avoid drawing any more unnecessary attention to myself.
A dental retainer and glasses were the fashionable accessories to my mother's choice of floral print blouses with lacy collars. But even those were bearable, since they often helped me disappear into the wallpaper.
No, the cause of my greatest anxiety was usually the first hour of the first day of school, when the teacher would stand in front of the classroom to take attendance.
"Stephanie Campbell? There you are, okay. Michael Clark? Okay, I see you there. And ... um..."
It was usually at that moment that I would watch the teacher pause and furrow her eyebrows while attempting to phonetically decipher my Korean name in her head before she read it aloud.
I would hold my breath, hoping against all hope that she would not stumble.
"Hmmm ... Eugene? Youu ... uh, jean?"
"It's Yu Jin," I would volunteer, quietly.
"What? Oh, I see. Yooo-jean?"
The teacher would look so hopeful she got it right that I would let it go. Never mind that my name was now virtually indistinguishable from Eugene's - the boy with the thick-framed glasses held together with tape and who was unfortunately afflicted with a perpetually drippy nose.
Besides, the other kids in the class were beginning to stare at me, and I could feel the back of my neck and cheeks start to flush with embarrassment.
I would go home and grumble about the situation to my mother.
"Your grandmother went to great lengths to chose a special name for you when you were born," she would tell me, more than once, in response to my complaints. "You should be proud of your name and where you come from."
But my mother finally relented to my incessant nagging and, in Grade 6, allowed me to start using Angela, the Catholic name given to me when I was baptized into the church.
It's been Angela ever since.
But times change, as do demographics, and Asian names are now more commonplace and accepted.
I don't regret choosing to represent myself by my middle name, but now that I'm older (and hopefully better dressed), I have grown to appreciate my Korean name. It's still is my first name, after all.
Yu Jin has also become a rather popular moniker for girls as well as a wide range of products. There's Tomy Yujin Corporation (a toy manufacturer that specializes in vending machines that dispense plastic, toy figurines), Yujin Robotics, Yujin Co Ltd. (a cement producer), Yujin perfume, and even a Yujin Restaurant (an upscale, Japanese place in New York).
Go figure.

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