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The Power of Reclaiming My Asian Name
Washington Post Jan. 2022
Marian Chia-Ming Liu.
Chia-Ming, a Chinese American journalist, tells of a man in an asian restaurant in South Florida was "mocking the accents of our waiter and the cook, loud enough for the entire room to hear. Her husband, also asian, stood up and glared at the man. They left the restaurant.
She goes on to talk about being accosted online, with racist tweets and emails after her stories of anti-Asian attacks were published.
The FBI found that in 2020, hate crimes against Asian people jumped 73 percent. According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in April 2021, one-third of Asian Americans fear threats and physical attacks. The pandemic has made Asians in America, even those who are native-born citizens, acutely aware that they are perpetual foreigners in the eyes of some of their neighbors and even friends, says Frank Wu, president of City University of New Yorks Queens College and author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.
She goes on to explain the importance of asian given names.
Campaigns like My Name, My Identity in the San Francisco Bay area are starting to pop up, where educators, parents, community members and students take a pledge to pronounce students names correctly and honor their backgrounds. Yee Wan, who spearheads the program, which launched in 2016, hopes to create a better sense of belonging in schools than she experienced when she immigrated at 17 and her ESL teacher renamed her Winnie.
She ends the story with. "So let me reintroduce myself: My full name and complete byline is Marian Chia-Ming Liu. Chia is pronounced with a J, like Ji. Liu like Leo. And yes, it includes all four words. Im proud of it all, because it represents my complete self, Asian and American."