What's In a Name...

Nguyen is a common Vietnamese last name, like Kim or Park in Korea, like Garcia in Spain or Mexico, like Smith or Jones. I first heard the name sometime in 1974 or 1975, when I was a boy in Northern California. Because my parents had adopted three children from outside the United States, we belonged to a social network of similar families, and within this network, I met some of the first Vietnamese refugee children who came to America. At the same time, entire families who had escaped Southeast Asia—the first of the boat people—were finding sponsorship through churches and other charitable agencies. Each September for the next several years, as more and more of these kids showed up in schools, teacher after teacher struggled with the name Nguyen. Did you pronounce every letter? Was anything silent? What about the unfamiliar “ng”? Sometimes you could just tell which name was next just by where the teacher was in the roll—“…McDonald, Myers, Nardin, Needham…”—and the way he stared at the sheet of paper. Finally the kid, having been through this before, spoke up from his or her desk and politely offered the proper pronunciation: “win.” (More or less.) The teacher scribbled something—a phonetic, maybe—and moved on. As the days passed, the teacher would get more and more comfortable with the pronunciation and soon he wasn’t taking roll at all; he knew everyone who was supposed to be in his class by sight and first name. As the years passed, I one day realized that it had been a long time since I’d heard a teacher struggle with the name Nguyen. Maybe that’s when the conflict in Vietnam really ended.
My brother’s real last name is Nguyen. His first name was Tuan, which is pronounced “toon.” (Again, more or less.) Tuan came to America with his real father, whose name was Quang. Quang died about a year after their arrival and a family belonging to the church that had sponsored them offered to foster my brother. That family, one we knew through that adoption network, gave him the name Bill. I’ve never thought the name suited him, but then I don’t know what name would. Bill chose Alexander as his baptismal name; he was studying ballet by then, and he liked its classical sound.
In revising my autobiographical book, I figured it was best to change names, and tried to find names that I thought suited the various persons. When I came to my brother, I tried out a couple things, but none of them suited his character. Then I hit upon Ian: although it’s Gaelic for “John,” it sounds sort of of Asian—or, as-Ian. And I liked the fact that it both sounded and looked like Tuan and Nguyen. I especially liked that it sounds like Bill’s real last name. One morning this past summer I was explaining all this to Bill and Susie. They were still trying to decide on a name for The Boy, as we were all calling him then. When I said “Ian” they looked at each other and said, “Ian. I like that. We should call him Ian.” Susie was especially pleased that the name could be linked with her own late father, who was John.
I’m watching Ian as I write this. He’s finally fallen asleep: he was fussing for a bit, but I walked him around the house and showed him the view through the windows where his late grandfather lived. He likes looking at the trees. I like showing him the trees. Maybe that’s the Indian in me. Or rather, the “Ind-Ian.”