My Name

“I’m Jack. Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Yiu-On.”

“Err… sorry, could you repeat that?”

“Umm. Yiu-On.”

“Y… you?”

“No, Yiu-O—actually, just ‘Y’ is fine.”

It probably comes down to the way you drop the last syllable. Introductory linguistics says that, as someone speaks, their voice gets quieter and quieter until they get to the next part. They’ve got a name for these parts: intonation units. A good name. A simple name.

“How do you spell that?”

“Oh, well, last name, Li: ell eye. First name, Yiu-On: capital why, eye, you, hyphen, capital oh, ennn. Pretend the i is an o and the pronunciation should make sense.”

You didn’t major in linguistics. Took a few introductory courses, but nothing too intense. Maybe you would’ve majored if you had time, or maybe you would’ve done a minor.

“What did you study?”

“Err, English.”

Strange. You’ve got the most Asian name possible. But English? It feels weird to say. You think about that quote by Zora Neale Hurston you heard a while back: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” You wonder if “colored” includes you.

“Ohh! English. Interesting. What made you want to go into that?”

At least it’s never a problem to claim usernames and website domains. You’ve  apparently got a housing estate on the other side of the world named after you, but how many Yiu-Ons do most people know? Autocorrect on the other hand—now that’s a whole other beast.

“Well, I actually took two years of computer engineering. But I was only ever in it for the money, and because my dad was an engineer. I thought I’d just tough it out and do writing on the side, but then the pandemic happened, and I thought, I can’t do this anymore. So I switched to English. Which was what I wanted to do in the first place.”

You know about intonation units, about em dashes and curly quotes, about how to write a decent story. But then there’s your name.

“Can you speak Chinese?”

“A little. I’m taking classes right now. I knew how to speak Mandarin when I was younger, but I’ve forgotten most of it. Which makes it a bit easier for me, because a lot of it is still floating up here somewhere. It’s just a matter of remembering what I’ve forgotten.”

What you’ve forgotten. You’ve stopped taking classes. You needed a break. What would your grandpa think? What about your grandma, rest her soul? What about all the teachers you’ve let down, who thought you were getting somewhere, who wanted you to be someone?

“Nice, nice. Where are you from? China?”

You know about intonation units, about em dashes and curly quotes, about how to write a decent story.

“Well, my mom is from Taiwan, and my dad is from Hong Kong. So I’m half Taiwanese, half Hong Kong…ese? I understand a bit of Cantonese, but I can’t speak it nearly as well as Mandarin. Haha. It’s a bit complicated.”

Just not in Chinese.

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