The Story of My Name

Something people in the US talk about is the "immigrant experience". It's an experience I've had, but didn't think about much when I was young. I assimilated quickly, having moved to Colorado at the tender age of four. I've no accent, no misunderstanding of cultural norms. I've never personally experienced racism or discrimination. As of last summer, I abandoned my Chinese citizenship entirely.

As I've grown older, I've started thinking about what the immigrant experience means to me. At first, I didn't think it meant all that much, given the factors I described above. But upon deeper introspection, and with some help from others, I've started to recognize some interesting aspects of my personal story as an immigrant. One of the most significant ones is the story of my name.

I was born in a Chinese hospital with the given name 孙微量, "Sun Wei Liang" (surnames come first in Chinese). "Wei Liang" can mean "a little amount" or "small, but powerful", or some other variants. My father gave it to me because he wanted me to be humble, but hardworking. (If you know me, you'll know he got halfwei there.) In addition, my father is a little superstitious, so the number of strokes in each character meets specific numerical requirements for luck, which you can read about here. I don't understand the requirements too well, but I still think it's cool.

Being political dissidents and academics, my parents were not happy in China, so they decided to pursue a better life overseas. In August of 2000 (we still celebrate the anniversary each year), our family moved to the US. We did so with the help of a pastor living in Colorado Springs, CO. She was one of the very few Chinese people we knew in the states, and she generously provided us lodging and other resources while we got settled. I still remember watching Cartoon Network in her basement and liking it, even though I did not understand the wacky sound effects and psychedelic colors.

Because of our benefactor's hospitality and religious disposition, our entire family converted to Christianity. My father was the last to join; I remember being baptized with him at the same ceremony. He tells me I prayed for him to do it, though I don't remember doing so. It's funny how times change. Nowadays, I'm an atheist, and he prays for me.

As part of our religious conversion, I was given the Christian name "Samuel". Looking back, I hate how the name was forced upon me. I was a five year old with no idea how anything worked, and these people unilaterally decided my name wasn't white or Christian enough for them, so they had the arrogance to rename me. It feels gross and colonialist and racist to me now, though at the time I didn't think much of it. It reminds me of something Richard Dawkins pointed out in one of his books: The idea of a Republican or Democratic baby seems ridiculous to us -- and for good reason -- but we are somehow perfectly fine with the idea of a Muslim or Hindu baby, as though a baby could somehow possess religious beliefs. It's one of the weird ways religion maintains influence in our society.

Samuel didn't really catch on much among my American friends, for a bizarre reason: On the first day of kindergarten, one of my classmates (whose name was Randy, because of course it was) decided to read everyone's name off the attendance sheet to show off his reading skills. He read my name as "way-long". I was five years old and didn't speak English at the time, so I assumed he had pronounced it correctly. (He hadn't). It wouldn't be until much later that I would realize how little sense this made, but by that time, the name had stuck, and I would be called "way-long" right up until the end of high school. It's crazy how a random decision by my five year old classmate totally changed my name -- my name, the first thing people know about me, the first tool I use to interface with the world -- for thirteen years.

Crazier still, my Christian community was Chinese, while my school community was American, so I led a double-life where Chinese people knew me as "Samuel", while American people knew me as "way-long". The irony of this situation hit me sometime around late elementary/early middle school. It was around that same time when I realized how I didn't like the name "way-long" at all, and would actually much prefer it to be pronounced correctly, but I was too lazy and embarrassed and afraid to say anything, so I managed to convince myself I didn't care. Instead, I mounted pettier rebellions: If I had a substitute teacher, I'd sometimes tell them my name was pronounced "why-ling" or "wailing" or "wee-lung" and watch my classmates try to stifle laughter, because they knew my name was actually pronounced "way-long". It was funny! Please, you've got to believe me, it was funny.

After living as "way-long"/"Samuel" from the ages of five to eighteen, I finally graduated high school. It was an exciting time for me. I wanted to live on my own, to increase the pace of my education, to meet and love new people. But on top of all that, college represented an opportunity to reinvent myself, to finally reclaim an aspect of myself which I'd felt had been appropriated. It was a chance to change my name.

I decided I liked the sound of "Wei". It's short and simple and easy to remember, but it's not Christian- or white-sounding, either. I enjoyed how it was pronounced like the word "way", as in a method, or a style, or a path. It seemed fitting and significant, for reasons I can't explain. Later, I found out its homophone "güey" in Mexican Spanish is a generic slang term referring to a (typically male) person, like "dude" in English. I liked that, too; it made my name feel multifaceted, cosmopolitan. Wei still easily lent itself to puns, which I didn't like as much, but I decided I'd put up with it. I don't regret that decision, either. I have heard some bad Wei puns and some great ones, and I've also been responsible for some terrible ones. But I suppose it's better to have loved and lost than to have never made a pun to begin with.

Names are a curious cultural phenomenon. Most people spend their entire lives self-identifying with a set of syllables they had no say in. Most people are perfectly fine with this. I decided to do something different, and I'm glad I did. I'm proud of my self-given name. I like how it sounds. I like how it represents, for me, a reification of my personal identity, my Chinese heritage, and my self-determination. You know what they sei: Where there's a will, there's me.

On Getting Stuck

My philosophy professor has a stutter. He described his stutter in two words: "getting stuck". I found this to be a wonderfully simple and effective description of his condition -- and as I about it more, I started wondering why getting stuck is so bad. What is it about getting stuck that we as humans find annoying, or embarrassing, or intolerable? Is it our need to keep moving forward, making progress? Is it our thirst for variety, novelty, stimulation? Is it our goal-oriented society driving us to be "productive"?

In the case of stuttering, it was none of these things. Our brains, my professor explained, have a tendency to fill in words when we're listening to people. This tendency, normally imperceptible, became immediately, glaringly obvious whenever my professor got stuck. It was the linguistic version of Google autofill, and it naturally led to a second, more actionable tendency: The urge to complete an unfinished word for him. This, our professor warned, was the exact wrong thing to do. If we chose to race him to the end of a word, he would most certainly lose, and that would only make the stuttering worse -- because stuttering, as he explained, is a social disorder. Most people who stutter will not get stuck when talking to a dog or a baby, because it's the specific act of trying to communicate an idea to someone else that triggers getting stuck. In a sense, stuttering is the human difficulty of self-expression made manifest and visceral. It's a difficulty we've all experienced.

I noticed myself doing a lot of autofilling throughout the class. Most times, I autofilled the word correctly. These were the cases when I personally experienced the reason stuttering is considered an impediment. Whenever I successfully predicted the word he was going to say, I felt my time had been somehow wasted. But then I started wondering: Why was it a waste of time to wait for someone who had gotten stuck?

In telling us how to respond to his stutter, our professor asked simply for our patience. The best case for his stutter, he told us, was dead air. Silence. So whenever he got stuck, we simply sat and waited. At first, the waiting exposed an uncomfortable impatience in me. I did not like spending precious half-seconds of lecture time in silence. Looking back, this was an entitled Wei to think. I was a mere student, after all, and to think my time was somehow being wasted in the presence of a guy who'd spent years and years of his life reading philosophical literature and publishing papers in respected journals was simply wrong. My time was not being wasted; I was just being impatient.

After a while, I realized my impatience wasn't even the worst of it. See, I didn't manage to autofill my professor's words correctly every time. At some moments, I anticipated one word, but my professor said something entirely different. These moments were humbling. They reminded me of the following quote by the Dalai Lama:

"When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But when you listen, you may learn something new."

My failed autofills betrayed a subconscious arrogance I held. I automatically assumed I knew what my professor was going to say before he'd even said it, and I was proven wrong in an immediate and direct way. By shining such a bright spotlight on my bad assumption, my professor's speech patterns have caused me to reconsider my approach toward conversation -- not just with him, but with people in general. I became more conscientious of the bad expectations and assumptions I'd been unknowingly smuggling into all of my conversations. I realized I needed to approach conversations with a more open, humble mind. To be still and listen.

As a consequence of my failed autofills, I became more interested in what my professor was saying. I set an intention to stop autofilling and listen with an open mind. While I wasn't successful every time, this intention still gave me a greater enjoyment and engagement with his lecture. I hung on to his words with eager anticipation. It was a more mindful, present state of listening, a state was far superior to my default setting.

There are many things in life we find annoying, or boring, or inconvenient. It's the most natural thing in the world to let them annoy us, bore us, and inconvenience us. I'm lucky my professor's stutter did not do any of these things to me. Instead, his stutter taught me valuable lessons in listening, patience, and mindfulness, and these lessons revealed an even deeper, more universal truth: Anything can teach us. On the road of self-improvement, nothing is an obstacle.