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Hello, my name is Sandy?

At three, I was too young to go to school, but my cousins and sister were all enrolled at Eunice Girls School in Bloemfontein. The girls in green. My sister, whose birthday is at the end of December, was placed in Grade 1 instead of Grade 2 to start school from the beginning. She had an extra English teacher whom we adored. This teacher suggested to my parents that we get English names to make the transition into school easier. Unlike me and my sister, my brother was born in South Africa two years after we immigrated and my parents, thoughtfully, called him Frank – after Benjamin Franklin, the kite and electricity guy. They hoped he’d be smart, and they were right. He excelled at school, graduated, went into the finance industry, and is now a qualified CA(SA).

The teacher liked ‘Jasmine’ for my sister, but for me my parents scrounged through a baby name book. They settled on ‘Sandy’. I don’t remember this. I just remember being called ‘Cheau Cheau’ by adults, ‘Ming-Cheau’ at Chinese school, 二妹 (for second sister) and, at home and socially, Sandy. There were a few names.

Honestly, I can understand why my parents did this – they wanted us to fit in. Unfortunately, however, an assimilated name doesn’t necessarily make things easier when your facial features, skin tone and culture are all different to what others around you are used to. Throughout school, I always preferred a nickname over being called ‘Sandy’. There were spinoffs like Sandz or Sandile but when I had a choice, I chose to dub myself M-C, for the initials of my Chinese name. I liked ‘Cheau’ as well, but the problem with that was that the English spelling made it sound like ‘chew’ as opposed to ‘chow’.

Back in Taiwan, like China and Korea, most names comprise three words and sound out as three syllables. My surname ‘Lin’ (I wouldn’t call it my last name as our surnames appear before our first names) means ‘forest’, ‘Ming’ we already covered and ‘Cheau’, which is pronounced ‘tjiao’ (almost ‘chow’), not ‘chew’, means ‘coincidental’, ‘skilful’, ‘artful’ or ‘cunning’. It is also used alone as a phrase for ‘as it happens’.

My family spoke Hokkien (a language spoken by most Taiwanese people) and Mandarin (what many know simply as Chinese) but once we emigrated to South Africa, things changed. Our names changed to characters used in the West and the way they sounded changed too. Not that I have a frame of reference. I was too young to remember anything. These Roman characters our names had been ‘translated to’ have no meaning. They are just the phonetics of a butchered version of what our names are in another language.

Chinese writing is vastly different to English. While the English alphabet has 26 letters, there are 35 letters in the Chinese alphabet. Taiwanese people use Chinese writing, like the Chinese do, for reading and writing. These letters, in combinations of one, two or three, form the characters or words. In English, using the Roman or Latin alphabet (the very letters that this story is written in) takes away the beauty behind the individual words of my name. And the way they’re supposed to sound.

What’s in a name?

After introductions, many would ask me, ‘But what’s your real name?’ When I told them, they would repeat my name back to me with a forced nasal sound, making my mother tongue into a joke or mockery. As innocent as the question might have been, it wasn’t fun to be on the receiving end. And the analysis that then had to be made. Every. Single. Time. In addition to the casual racism or discriminative mockery, there were the typical microaggressions.

‘But what’s your real name?’ If I responded that my name was Sandy. Of course an Anglicised name couldn’t be a yellow face’s real name.

‘So where are you from?’ Because they felt entitled to know – and of course I couldn’t be from South Africa.

‘I mean, before Bloemfontein, where are you really from?’ Because they weren’t satisfied with my answer and needed a connection to something Asian.

‘But you don’t look South African, where are you really from?’ Again, because they simply felt entitled to know.

Some were more blatant with their ignorance:

‘Are you Chinese or Japanese?’ As though these are the only two types of yellow in existence.

‘… [sundry nasal sounds as though a non-speaker is pretending to speak an East or Southeast Asian language] …’

‘I know “so and so” from the sushi place I go to, he is such a nice chap.’

‘I love Thai food!’ When I eventually responded with ‘Taiwan’.16

While I could understand their curiosity, the interrogation, the entitlement to personal information and an unwillingness to sense my discomfort, or take the hint when I gave short answers, was hurtful. It was uncalled for. It only served to create a deeper sense of anxiety, confusion and anger.

It feels like I have always been an angry individual, even as a child. And the internal discussion of ‘who am I?’ and ‘what am I?’ never ends.

There was no trace of Sandy Lin on any official documentation. Not my passport nor my green ID book. The only Sandy Lin to be found was on my school report and the labels on my schoolbooks.

After Matric, my folks took me to open up a student bank account, as I’d be moving to Cape Town to study. I remember how awful the staff at Standard Bank made me feel when they told me I couldn’t get a student account because my Matric certificate said ‘Sandy Lin’ whereas my ID said Ming-Cheau Lin. They said for all they knew I could be ‘two different people’. In my humble opinion, while identity theft is a valid problem, an eighteen-year- old teenage immigrant, accompanied by her parents, wanting to open a basic student savings account seems unlikely to fall under probable causes for identity theft.

Everyone at the bank was staring at this Taiwanese family as we walked out in unnecessary disappointment. We didn’t want to make a scene. There was nothing we could do but leave and try at another bank.

My name, my identity, my brand

In college, I studied brand communications and specialised in copywriting. This gave me the privilege to reflect on my identity and it also gave me some new perspectives. It allowed me to gain more confidence in my cultural identity and my Chinese name. It was then that I decided to reclaim my birth name, my identity as a Taiwanese woman and immigrant raised in South Africa.

That being said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a Western name. It’s about choice and how it makes ‘you’ feel. Having a Western name would make my life easier, especially when getting a restaurant reservation, or being judged and discriminated against, or stereotyped, in advance. With a Western name I would be more likely to get a call-back on my CV when applying for a copywriting job – which by the way never happened in my case. Every junior position I got was through a recommendation. And I was headhunted for my final full-time agency position due to the years of experience I had in both food and copywriting and the reputation I’d built for myself. I suppose having won a Getaway Blog Award for my food blog didn’t hurt either.

The thing is, once I was mature enough to understand the reasoning behind being given an English name and then to realise the effect it had on me, I just didn’t feel comfortable with it. Sandy was not who I was. But reclaiming Ming-Cheau came with its own set of problems.

Being made to feel that it was my fault that I had a name people weren’t used to was one, which also seemed to give them permission to interrogate me about it. By reclaiming my identity, I had to question myself, was I ‘asking for it’?

Many from my childhood didn’t understand the change – to some extent they even found it humorous. Others use Ming-Cheau but adopt a fake ‘Chinese’ accent when they say it. Some people literally hear ‘Megan’ and some think my name is Lin (even though Lin appears last, like all other surnames here). Then there are the ones who feel they’re entitled to ask a million questions, just based off my name. I find this invasive, especially when it happens in a professional or non-personal setting.

Understand that this has happened to me many times and still does.

One positive result, at least, is that it has helped me become sensitive towards others with a similar plight.17