I am not sure you appreciate the violence you inflicted on this readership by specifying your birth year as 2003. We always knew as an intellectual exercise inferred from your public collegiate matriculation, but still!
The part where he was like "oh those olden days after Obama but before Aziz Ansari" killed me. That was like a week in grad school, how can you tell them apart???
Amazing post, Milan. As an Indian guy in his 20s, a lot of it resonated, maybe more so than I’d like, especially the bit about how Asian men are presented in our culture as undateable losers.
FWIW, I’ve been really heartened at how the mainstream culture is shifting to present Asian men as “attractive.” Simu Liu being in Shang Chi and Barbie is exciting!
The Kumail getting swole thing was first, right? When the historical record of the acceptance of Southeast Asian men in pop culture gets written, he’s gotta be up there as one of the most important ones. I didn’t like him when I was in my twenties because I was more into angry Hari Kondabolu rather than nice guy Kumail Nanjiani.
This is both Naveen Andrews and Senthil Ramamurthy erasure from the 2000s. I really hated that the former got reintroduced to the current generation, only to play a paunchy creepy and pathetic Sunny in that Elizabeth Holmes series.
Milan - you’re a good writer and an ambitious person. That’s great. There are different ways to look at one’s life without compromise. There’s no fitting in for anyone anywhere. In my town, the only thing worse than a Jew is a Jew married to a Chinese. And that’s just fine! When you’re a Jew you don’t have waste time wondering if your neighbors will kill you. I knew that growing up in the Jewish neighborhood I grew up in…in the old country, 1960s and 70s Brooklyn, and I experienced that in multicultural Cambridge MA too, where i was an anthropologist, researching and observing amongst them urban dwellers — Harvard, MIT, Leslie, BU; students, faculty, groundskeepers, sweepers…no different. But you don’t have to be a Jew or Chinese or Bobby, Nikki, Kamala, Vivek, or you. Irish Italian Malaysian Appalachian…whomever is living next to you…the same. 3 clicks away from using children for meat, 3 clicks away from working together to build something useful and exuberant.
Give up the fairy tale. “Predominant culture” - there isn’t one. The culture is a mix and one has to navigate through it…one can glide or one can flail; one can choose - with delight or with resentment. Yeah, out work, out lift them,out do them. But who is them? I say this to my own 1/2 jew 1/2 chinese kid: just work hard, ignore the ignorant, and if ‘they’ come after you, in a way you can’t ignore, well then you have to crush them. So easy. Dont waste time on hand wringing.
The focus on ‘fitting in’, it’s a myth of America. What’s great here is that we MOSTLY don’t kill each other. A giant improvement. And that there is a sizable population of peoples here who ARE embracing of others.
This conversation, here on Slow Boring, well really it’s So Boring. The institutional capture around it - keeps the conversation and effort focused away from getting better. A better trajectory - ‘what did we do today to make things work a little better’
I don’t resonate with this at all. I definitely feel, as a white straight guy, that I fit in, and Milan’s experiences of not fitting in are highly distinct from anything I’ve encountered. I think his piece is more grounded in reality than what you’ve written here.
As a white gay guy it's easy for me to see the difference. I always feel like I fit in except in this one way that always feels a bit different. And I say that as someone who has never encountered significant personal homophobia.
Now I can agree that America makes it easy for me to be accepted, as I think the poster meant. But I can tell the difference where I just fit in and where I stand out.
As a gay half Indian guy I can see a lot about how both identities have progressed over my life. In addition to Hasan Minhaj and Aziz Ansari and Vivek Ramaswamy and Kamala Harris and the other Indian people that are now models of one sort or another, I also see Neil Patrick Harris and Sam Altman and Janelle Monae and other queer people that are now models of one sort or another. It doesn’t matter that not all of these people are ones that I like - if anything it’s actually better that there are enough now that they are starting to represent a whole spectrum rather than just one way to be.
Hmm, that's interesting, I guess it's a sign of how much better things are that LGB public figures are increasingly known for things other than being gay.
To put my own personal twist on this, the only common trait I can think of that could possible put me in a minority status was being raised atheist. I never had any problem with this in Boise, since there isn't one dominant religion here. But if I moved to, say, the Deep South...who knows?
I grew up Jewish in north central Florida in the 50s and 60s. We few Jews (two of us in my elementary school) were definitely the odd men out, existing in a deeply Christian culture where the standard second question one is asked is "what church do you go to?" But it wasn't a big deal because -- I think -- the Christian society as it existed then was so secure (or devoted their antagonistic energies toward Blacks) that it couldn't be bothered by the odd Jew. But not for a moment did we doubt that we were on the outside looking in.
Today? I'm not sure. The society has grown more tolerant, but the Christian community has gotten to feel more embattled and aggressive.
I remember looking at a Vanderbilt University list in the late 90s for grad roommates that the department had on hand and seeing "Christians Only" being a prominent criteria for many people. It was awkward when the admin would recommend someone and I saw that stiupulation in their record. I had never seen that coming from my northeastern undergrad.
It's not something I had gotten before, but we just moved to a neighborhood on the edge of suburban/rural Ohio, and my boyfriend told me that one of our new neighbors asked him that in their first conversation.
I grew up atheist (well, from ~10 years old) in Alabama.
I was given a little bit of sh** in middle school and high school, but it was usually triggered by me being a very obnoxious and in-your-face kind of atheist kid.
That was ~2000. I can only imagine it has improved since then.
I do get the impression that it would have been different in the 80s, though.
This is interesting because sometimes I get the idea that straight white guys never feel like they fit in because there are so many cultural standards for "masculinity" that every guy is going to fall short one way or another. (This is not to say I haven't known men who were 100% comfortable with themselves nevertheless.)
How many generations has your family been in America? I’m perceived as white and it resonates with me. Milan’s perception of “whites people” frankly seems to me to reflect his own idealized projection of how the grass is greener for others than any objective reality
I didn't read Milan as saying that no white people experience the things he's talking about, though maybe I overlooked something. I was responding to Robert, who wrote, "There’s no fitting in for anyone anywhere. … “Predominant culture” - there isn’t one. … The focus on ‘fitting in’, it’s a myth of America." I think all of these things Robert said are not true. The fact that you yourself don't always feel you fit in doesn't contradict my point, which is that I myself (with a family that, yes, has been in the country for many generations—thats kind of the point I'm making) definitely feel I fit in and always have, and I think a lot of people who are part of the majority culture feel the same way.
I'm sure Milan doesn't mean to imply that all non whites feel like him—it's true he generalizes, but almost no generalization is meant to be universal. I think the idea that the piece implies that no white person feels this way is not only "not indisputable" but basically unsupportable, though again, point out to me anything I'm missing.
Regarding your last sentence: it's simply not a universal experience. I don't share the experience; I think I've said this three times now. And I don't have any reason to think that anyone in my family shared the experience either.
The idea that there aren’t central or hegemonic tendencies in American culture seems just…downright bizarre for a social scientist to believe. It’s true that American society is unusually pluralistic, but if you’re far from one of the modal clusters in some salient and perceptible trait, people will notice and at least sometimes react negatively.
Yes, i was being a bit tongue in cheek there, and i'm not really a social scientist [and uh, replication problem, which even Kahneman says about his own work, is a problem. It's a bunch of great ideas though, and that's enough] . I spent a year in Cambridge talking to everyone (while my son went to a school program there for a year, which was a ridiculous bust, but since i had the time and interest to walk around and see what the culture was, i did). 'people will notice and ...react' - that's the issue right here fer me...i'm super outlier because i gave no fux in my career years, and still dont. I did work that people said couldn't be done; and while i'm no teacher, except to my kid, most people who spent any amount of time working with me, made money, learned a ton, and then went on to do similar [in construction, not academia]. The bar is low, you just have to be a little bit better than mediocre; and give no fux (but treat people well). I learned all i needed to know in the boyscouts and from American Youth Hostels. What 'professional education' has devolved into...is appalling. And the bulk of professional education now = starts with identity based sorting. We're so deep in it, we're swimming in it, and we don't notice. So I find it troubling when there's so much attention on 'who looks like who'. Nobody really looks like anyone else if you go a little deeper. In other words...we're shallow?
I disagree. I live in a Houston suburb - not the super diverse kind like Sugar Land - and it is really obvious that white Baptists named Jack Smith are going to have a much easier time getting elected to city council or the school board than atheists with a weird name like mine. There really is a predominant culture and it's not easy when you don't fit in.
Or it IS easy when you don't fit in. Why 'fit in'? That said....there are many different ways to be; i'm fine not 'fitting in' / my career was and is fine, my sense of belonging is that i belong to various organizations and groups where i do 'make a difference', my kid is fine. Not 'fitting in' hasn't harmed me in any way and on net, i think it's been positive for my geographic and professional communities. If i had wanted to 'fit in' yes, it would have been a struggle, because: old boys network here, old church networks, old school networks, old Harvard/Yale peoples here too. But i have no need or desire for acceptance; and if people don't 'look like me', and/or i don't see 'people who look like me', it don't bother me not at all.
I get the general point about trusting yourself to deal with life, but disagree that anything about this is boring. It's infinitely interesting to find out in particular about various ways that people don't "fit in." Sometimes those ways clump together in terms of ethnic background (or even simply in terms of being first-generation: I'm fascinated with accounts of cultural tensions between one's immigrant parents and one's own social environment, because they indicate so many things about cultures in general.)
Of course most of us (except for Tom Hitchner below who feels like he fits in, which I find intriguing on its own) have found ways to deal greater and lesser degrees of not fitting in. And yes, there's a definite unhealthy trend among the immature to make "not fitting in" the defining characteristic of their selfhood.
But that's not what Milan is doing here. As his posts are about to go to the (still-retrievable) Archive In The Sky he's retroactively giving us more information about some important aspects of his intellectual perspective, which may prove useful to people like me who are always keenly interested in the personalities behind the ideas.
What's 'boring' to me [and it was a little glib], is one's physical identity is all or has such great primacy. You look X, so then Y. Yeah sure, that's perhaps the first thing, and it's really easy. That Identity / victim / trauma / insult / insensitive - the whole axis is just...simplistic and, well, boring. Because we immediately CAN get past that, and often do, or used to, as a culture. But now that simplistic identity behavior is constantly being pushed by media and politics; and its reductiveness is foolish. But it allows us to never talk or focus first on financial class and money issues which are far larger classifiers than: you look X so you must Y. Ones aspect and affect are more influenced by money and 'class' than 'you look X so Y'. Unless the X is, 'you look like you earn 150k so therefore Y'. Not talking about money allows us to continue to drive wages down and extract money from labor, instead of a more reasonable distribution of dividends from labor capital and innovation.
Don't worry, everyone will be bored with this pretty soon. I certainly enjoy pushing back along the same lines as yours, but I've always read it as an ephemeral trend that the kids will grow out of as they learn to navigate real life. Media and politics will eventually follow (they can be a bit slow on the uptake.)
As a 65-year-old Irish Catholic (who nowadays just gets taken for a generic white guy), you may be surprised -- no, shocked -- to learn that I shared many of your insecurities about growing up in a predominantly mainline Protestant culture. (And my family has been living in America since before the Civil War!) I won't go into all of it -- I could write a lengthy blog post of my own -- but my son, for example, who also has a typical Irish name was once on the no-fly list too. (He must have shared a name with someone from the IRA.) As for role models growing up, the Kennedys? Talk about aping WASP culture! My parents hated the Kennedys! And stereotypes about the Irish? What's the first thing that comes to your mind, a drunken reveler on St. Patrick's Day? A cop? A firefighter? As I said, I could go on and on. But I guess the whole point is that unless your ancestors came over on the Mayflower you probably share some of these insecurities too. It's all a part of the American experience.
My dad is from a mostly-Irish American Catholic family and is about your age; I find the similarities and differences between the ways you talk about your experience and identity interesting.
He tends to talk about being an Irish Catholic as a distinction that was visible but already fading even when he was a kid, and he generally sees himself as a pretty typical/paradigmatic Northeastern US upper middle class professional— he sees himself as a “normal” American, and the WASP blue bloods as a sort of a decadent and out-of-touch aristocracy.
I wonder why his perspective is different from yours. I’d guess that his skepticism of, and consequent psychological distance from, the Catholic Church as an institution played a part— as did marrying a (mostly) ethnic German Protestant woman from the Midwest. Social mobility timing might have played a role too— my dad’s dad was a working class guy who became an Army officer during the war, and went on to be a white collar manager, so the psychodrama of integrating into a more hegemonic US culture might have hit a generation earlier.
I imagine that “the point where I don’t feel like The Other anymore” will hit in different generations for different members of more recent immigrant groups too (and might be tougher for people who look more visibly different from the population average, depending on how much intermarriage there is etc)
I was assigned an Indian first name at birth (Deva) because my white patents were Hari Krishnas. It sucked. I was teased mercilessly and legally changed it to David when I was six. It sucked despite having white skin and would have sucked more if I had brown skin.
And yet the kids teasing me were other five years olds in a racially diverse Montessori school in Greenbelt, Maryland. We had an Indian girl in my class and one of the teachers and several of the students were black. The other kids were not indoctrinated racists, they were just acting out human nature.
The jokes you hear on TV are more politically correct than 20 years ago and yet mental illness has increased. People worry more about bullying even though it is happening less. A big part of me thinks that kids are always going to form status hierarchies, only a few boys can date the cutest girls, and the thrust of public policy should be making sure the people on the bottom don’t get smushed.
Milan’s otherness has decreased, not because of any intentional public policy, but because the Indian American community has multiplied and flourished, and also because he is broad minded enough to view Hindus as ethnic cousins when he is (at least part) Sikh.
I don’t want to dismiss the pain Milan has experienced, but I do think otherness is often better lived than ignored or eradicated.
It really is scary how kids can trend down mean paths quickly due to simple human nature, and how it's highly important to cut off that meanness right at the pass when it happens.
My first name is Colin in part because my dad was worried that if I had a traditional Indian name it would hurt my ability to get jobs later in life. Have very much the same relationship to Obama you do (worked on the campaign and for DNC in part because of this same feeling).
Anecdote about the dating issue. I’ll be honest, I’often wondered when I was single that if I wasn’t Indian would I have had more success in my dating life. I had one incident where I’m fairly certain a girl did not end up going on a date with me because her friend had questions about my background (long story a long time ago so a variety of reasons best to keep things vague). And it was hard not to then wonder after that if a girl didn’t like me because I said something stupid or because of…something else. Reality is, majority of the time the likely proximate reason is I do not exactly have game and the girl in question would not have been interested no matter what my background.
On a more serious note. I ask people on here to read this anecdote and ask yourself how this might apply to interactions between black Americans and the police. When you watch videos and a police shooting or cases of saying tasering a band leader in Alabama and a lot of people’s first reaction is “well why is this person talking back and not complying. If they just followed all of the police’s instructions none of this happens”. And you know what, in many of these cases, I think you can absolutely say that this person talking back or getting angry and not wanting to comply was NOT a great move and in a lot of cases possibly unwarranted given realities of the situation (in a lot cases, the person in question really was doing something wrong). But I really ask you consider that in a ton of cases, the person in question is responding and reacting to let’s just say previous questionable interactions with police and just how often these questionable interactions that don’t involve a shooting or tasering or anything caught on tape happen depressingly often.
I don't know, I see some of these interactions people have with police and I probably would never dream of doing or saying some of these things with the public librarian, much less a police officer.
I have long considered the police shooting eruptions to be mostly a proxy battle over police harassment, which is what is actually motivating people to be pissed off on a totally non-ideological level.
As a Bengali mom who moved to Cambridge at 13, now with half Indian kids, it was neat to read this. I have a dak naam but never gave one to my kids. But I did drag them to the local Durga pujos in middle school gyms when they were growing up. I’ve tried to cook machher jhol bhat to keep the culinary traditions alive. My older one is your age with a name that is mispronounced all the time. I can only hope we aren’t messing you kids up.
Anyway, your parents did a fantastic job with you and I wish you all the best in your adventures ahead. Remember, one out of every 6 humans is Indian. There will be more of us here before you know it.
As a kid I used to hate going to Indian functions but I’m glad we did it and wish I had paid more attention and had more connection to the social and cultural aspects.
Best wishes Milan on the road ahead. Thank you for sharing this genuinely moving personal story.
I firmly believe that you and your family have a quintessentially American story- you ARE America, even when some people try to obscure that. I really do think these words will inspire future kids who feel what you felt, and that there is some hope that things will be better for them.
In the words of your hero: "That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others ... America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes ... We honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar!"
I think "lived experience" is a flawed concept, but when I see comment sections like this it does make me think that it's often unfairly dismissed in its entirety. Clearly, while this doesn't apply to every member of a group, there's some salience to the idea that experiences between groups can be just *different* in difficult-to-quantify ways, and there's a lot of back and forth about how someone's subjective experience is actually wrong and they're just being paranoid based on race. It really is a strange dynamic to see so many people try to invalidate an experience that they have only a window into instead of a lifetime into, and it seems to only come out in force over identity politics.
Imagine if someone said "I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." It would be weird!
No wonder people in identity groups fall back on saying their lived experience is sacrosanct and beyond reproach. It seems like an overcompensation for the fact that their relaying of direct experience is considered a prime target for debate by people who don't have that direct experience.
Thank you for this comment. Is it my imagination or have the normie Democrats around here been slowly getting replaced by libertarians and Wes Yang superfans?
I’d say there’s been a shift even since I joined in 2021. I think the desire to criticize the excesses of the far left in this comment section brought a lot of people who want to just bash the woke and has caused some political drift towards the right.
One of my favorite Scott Alexander insights: "if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." (I'm not saying Matt tried to found such a community, nor are there that many "witches" here compared to some places, it's just a very light instance of the same issue.)
I don't think that's accurate on Matt's writing. One of his leading takes, YIMBYism, is very libertarian accessible and adjacent on the grounds of land development being too regulated by the government.
Very fair, in my head I was basically thinking of libertarianism ex-YIMBY. Some concrete examples are the "regulate porn" "regulate gambling" and "raise the alcohol tax" takes.
"The much more plausible explanation is that no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota. People attempting to construct some alternate definition of freedom that will better-track the libertarian political program will try and fail to put together a metaphysically workable distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedoms that immediately collapses in the face of air pollution, unsafe driving, lawsuits, etc."
You find libertarians? I feel like not so long ago someone was saying libertarianism is only white guys and I went googling for "prominent libertarians" and found every race and ethnicity and social class background represented. But even if it was true, it doesn't feel like a great way to take a dig at a philosophy.
In any case is this even the right topic? I feel like the take is more that the site has gotten more crank and reactionary or something, not libertarian in any way I find meaningful. But that said, people have been saying "it's getting more right wing" since I signed up and when I go baac and look at old comments they don't really feel all that different.
the irony is that this comments section (obviously a lot different people back in 2021 and now) went really 'lived experience' and 'feelings' for this post about selective schools:
I don’t think the reply to “I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." Is weird. In the right context it identifies the insecurity and compensatory narcissism of adolescence. With respect, that is, at least in part, what Milan is expressing.
re: names. I live in Vietnam and one thing I've always wondered about is which cultures adopt "American" names and which don't. Here in Vietnam it is very common to find out that "Joe" is really "Phi" and than "Nancy" is really "Duyên". But you would never (I think?) find an Italian named Antonio going by Andy or a Swedish Bjorn going by Bobby. Japanese never seem to adopt Anglo-names. I wonder if that used to be different in the 1950s and 1960s? I don't remember really meeting any Indonesians who have swapped in Anglo-names for their Agung or Indah. I don't have much experience with Africa but I don't really remember meeting a lot of people with Anglo-names from there. They seem happy to rock with Kofi or Afua.
As an aside: in Vietnam there is a law that in practice means you have to have a Vietnamese name to have Vietnamese citizenship. You would be surprised (well, probably not) at the number of mixed-marriages where the husband (because it's always a foreigner husband...) is indignant that they can't give their kid a Western name on their Vietnamese passport.
Jews almost always have a name that fits into the local culture, plus a Hebrew name that’s used for religious and communal purposes. My understanding is many Chinese do the same. And you mentioned Kofi - many Ghanaians have an English name on top of their day name (Kofi just means you’re a male born on Friday).
And then there’s the long history of anglicizing surnames to make them more pronounceable (and in our case, less obviously Jewish).
Nobody should have to anglicize their name to avoid prejudice. But anglicizing for that reason, or just for easy pronounceability, is as American as apple pie. Those Hungarian and Polish names don’t become easier for people to sound out, even if you’ve been here for five generations. So I always felt a little bad that Niki Haley and Bobby Jindal took heat for their names. They’re just doing what everyone else has.
For normie American Jews, any Hebrew name is not used for “communal purposes.” If a specified Hebrew name exists as anything other than a direct translation of someone’s given name, it’s trotted out for the Bar Mitzvah and forgotten.
I’ve always felt that “make a good faith, substantial effort to correctly pronounce peoples’ names” was a place where the woke left was... obviously correct
Emphatically yes, especially teachers. But equally emphatically, some people WILL inevitably screw up your name and it's best not to take it personally. My five-letter Polish surname is mispronounced and misspelled so often that I seldom even bother correcting it. Because who cares? My boss mispronounced it for a year and I didn't care. (If someone is deliberately mocking with their mispronunciation, that's a different story.)
There are real injustices in the world. This ain't one of them.
Some of the immigrants I've met who use American nicknames do so because their actual name has sounds in it that aren't present in English - I'd bet its in general more common for those cultures.
Yes. I went to high school in Kentucky with friends whose parents had left Laos and Cambodia when they were tiny (for obvious 1970s reasons). They chose Americanized names which some people called them by and some didn’t. When I was at their houses, their parents never, ever called them those names. I wondered at the time if they were even aware of their kids having self-applied the Americanized names.
I grew up in a college town in rural Illinois, so kind of a culture clash between high education and rural America. There were loads of people from all over the world, and many of them ended up staying and raising kids in the area.
It was pretty standard there that everyone adopted an “English” first name and especially they gave them to their kids.
I had a friend, Andy, whose East Asian parents invited my family for dinner and taught us how to use chop sticks. I remember they said they specifically they wanted their son to be American, and wanted his name to be easy for his friends and teachers.
And I remember afterwards my parents saying how sweet that was, and my dad saying how honored he was to live in a place where people came from all over the world, and how they brought their culture with them, but also made the effort to merge into ours. “That’s the melting pot.”
I obviously don’t know how Andy or his family really felt deep down. But they seemed happy, and I know they were well-liked and spoken kindly of in the community.
I share this just to say, I think there’s a positive version of making an effort to blend in to your new home. Emphasis on *blend*, as my Dad saw it, bring your culture with you and share it proudly, but also offer some signs of respect and appreciation for the place you’re joining. It certainly doesn’t need to be names. But, if it is, I don’t think we should assume that this necessarily comes from a bad place.
Interestingly, in the old days all Europeans used to translate their names in other countries. That's why we know them as John Calvin and Christopher Columbus instead of Jean Calvin and Cristoforo Colombo. Today they only do that for royals and popes.
Anyway, I actually don't think immigrants from any country "adopt" anglo names in large number. Where the rubber hits the road is what they name their kids. In that, Indians stand out in sticking with Indian names. Probably a combination of: how recently they came over, how successful they are, and the fact that Indian names are pretty pronounceable in English.
I think there was a shift in the metaphysical view of names that occurred sometime in the 20th century. The older, and in my opinion more sensible, view seems to have been that the names Anthony and Antonio, e.g., were exactly the same name, the former being the English of it and the latter being the Spanish (or Italian). Antonio becomes Anthony in English (vice versa) just as Venezia becomes Venice or chiesa becomes church.
But this breaks down when names outside the greater European nominative universe are introduced. There isn't a longstanding English form of traditional Indian or Chinese names. And then somewhere along the way I think the idea that an American and a Mexican have the same name in different languages shifted subtly to the idea that they simply have two different names. My grandmother, a Mexican woman, is named Maria Luisa. But in school in the 1930s she was called Mary-Lou. I think this would be seen as wrong, maybe even offensive now. But I don't really think it is, it's just a different implicit theory of what a name is.
It’s interesting that this convention seems to have been less consistent in English than in other European languages (Shakespeare unapologetically gives characters Spanish, French, and Italian names, for example.)
Also, in the rest of Europe, you can sort of pinpoint the shift sometime in the late 19th century (ie: Bel Canto opera gives English-speaking characters and historical figures Italian names— “Lucia di Lammermoor” or “Maria Stuarda”, but the late 19th/early 20th century Puccini is happy to have characters named “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton” and “Dick Johnson.”
Koreans are also fairly successful and came relatively recently, but you’re much more likely to see a “Randall Park” than, say, a “Hyun-Jin Park” as the kid of a Korean immigrant. So I’m not sure how much that’s a factor in Indians largely sticking with “old country” names.
Doesn't that go to the "pretty pronounceable" issue as evan bear suggested? (I've seen this point brought up elsewhere before -- because of the shared Indo-European background of English and most north Indian languages at least, many Indian names are often more intuitively pronounceable by English-speakers than names from East Asian languages.)
Yao is his family name so having an Anglicized first name wouldn’t fix that regardless!
But anyways let’s not act like all East Asian names are somehow unpronounceable.
What is the case is that giving your kid a traditional East Asian name in North America effectively “others” them, so most East Asian parents don’t do it. Indian parents, for whatever reason, don’t seem bothered by this.
Japanese people are not really like other East Asian groups because (1) there are a lot fewer of them here, (2) a large percentage of those who are here came over much longer ago than other groups, (3) their names are as a rule much easier to pronounce in English than other East Asian names are. I would not even include them in the analysis as it's just apples and oranges for a whole host of reasons.
Chinese names are pretty frequently butchered. Yes, there are some that are easier for anglos to pronounce than others, but I would not generalize from a handful of celebrities you're familiar with.
No, your factual premises are wrong. Koreans started coming over in large number a decade or two earlier than Indians did. Both groups have been successful in this country, but Koreans came in under a less selective regime - more nurses and such, fewer computer programmers - and during less tolerant times. Korean names are also harder to pronounce than Indian names are. These are all marginal differences, not black and white, but they add up.
Another factor I didn't mention but I think someone else here alluded to is that a lot of Indians already use English in India so the idea of using an Indian name in English doesn't seem unusual. Whereas a Chinese person coming over is more likely to see using an English name as simply a normal function of switching to a different language.
I had the same thought. I grew up straddling Chinese and American culture and every Chinese family I knew gave their kids a fairly traditional American name. Same for me in reverse - when I lived in China I used a Chinese name. Good luck with a “Z” in Chinese.
I feel like I don’t see too many Europeans in the US, but the ones I know also went by (or got) nicknames or transliterations. At least the men. Justinus became Justin, one guy with two first names and two last names just became “Bull” which is badass. Even my own last name (crazy Germans not spelling things normally) gets confusing to anyone who sees it. I end up becoming Conan (read: Barbarian) which is fun, though.
What we call ourselves has immense influence on how others perceived us and says something about our own priorities. Do we prioritize fitting in or standing out? Are we formal or casual? Do we correct mispronunciation or go with the flow?
And then of course this is signaled again in what people name their kids. It looks like Nikki Haley’s are Rena and Nalin; Bobby Jindal’s are Slade, Shaan, and Selia. Take that for what you will.
My dad came from Scandinavia and became John because his name was too foreign. My Scandinavian but now not-uncommon name is theoretically pronounceable but I still have to give people 3 chances to get it right before I give up and accept they will not get it. We gave our kids Anglo, easy names, but they have a Hispanic surname. (Oh, and one of them is ethnically Asian, adopted. Sometimes people get very confused. That kid did not enjoy explaining why they had a "Mexican" name). All this is to say that the naming thing isn't strictly tied to non-white, ethnic-sounding names, though being non-white adds a layer of confusion and having a last name that codes for an ethnically disfavored group is not fun.
My last name is as British as they come, the ancestors who gave it to me having been here since 1680 or so.
But since it's Scottish, no one gets it right, despite similarity to a cluster of common Irish last names that people do know how to pronounce in the US.
People ask me sometimes how to pronounce my last name, and, having been divorced from its origins for over 150 years, it occurs to me I have no idea how it "should" be pronounced.
Mine is throughly Anglicized, such that though I know how it was pronounced I only ever do so when someone asks why it’s spelled how it is as part of the explanation.
Same with me, except it's five letters. There's two common ways people mispronounce it, a third way that our family always uses but is also a butchering from the fourth way that you'd say it in German.
I was going to guess "Auer," but, based on the reference to even Germans being surprised it's a last name, now I'm thinking maybe "Guja" or another surname that technically has a non-Germanic origin but has been "domesticated" into German usage.
I think that a lot of it is just phonology? The Japanese/Chinese comparison is illustrative here. Almost all of the phonemes in Japanese appear in English (and the missing one can be reasonably approximated with an “r”), so English-speakers who make a good-faith effort can learn to pronounce Japanese names pretty quickly. Chinese phonology has features like the “four tones” which English speakers aren’t able to differentiate or correctly pronounce without special training and practice, so most English speakers will atrociously mangle Chinese names.
That's some of it but feels like an incomplete explanation, hence my ongoing wonder about the issue.
I know people named Minh ("men"), Duyen ("you-en"), Hieu ("hue"), Phi ("fee"), Mai ("my"), My ("me"), Vy ("v"), Cun ("coon"), Ha ("ha") ... all of which are easy for a foreigner to pronounce 90% accurately. But they all pick English names when dealing with foreigners. Remember this is in Vietnam. These are names that are basically only ever used at work with foreigners.
As I said below, while those syllables can be pronounced, *none* of those romanizations make sense for anyone who doesn't already know how to read them and very, very few would get them right on the first try.
I didn't even know Duyen, lol, and Cun is pronounced completely differently in Mandarin, though the rest are reasonably close to Mandarin.
I think some of this is a legacy of how the romanization was done... I agree those are easy to pronounce, but not for tourists trying to sound out the spelling?
My uncles Antonio and Giuseppe go by “Tony” and “Joe,” respectively. Perhaps a little different because these are translations of their Italian names, not invented nicknames.
In fairness to those of Vietnamese descent living in the States, I can't wrap my mouth around many phonemes despite speaking a language which is somewhat related. In fact I think speaking Mandarin made my ability to pronounce Vietnamese worse.
I am not surprised that most East and Southeast Asian parents here opt for Americanized names or nicknames, given how often they've likely heard their own names butchered and how sick they are of trying to have it fixed.
As for citizenship, I don't even think a Chinese national ID card can be printed with anything except characters, as well, so I imagine that China's rules on that are the same.
"I can't wrap my mouth around many phonemes despite speaking a language which is somewhat related. In fact I think speaking Mandarin made my ability to pronounce Vietnamese worse."
FWIW, Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language and Mandarin a Sino-Tibetan one. That is: linguists cannot find a common ancestor for these two languages, even when they search as far back as possible. Vietnamese does have a large number of loanwords from Middle Chinese, but loanwords often see pronunciation shifts to match local phonology anyways.
But there are sometimes areal effects by which neighboring languages develop similar phonology, despite being unrelated. Famously, India has this, with both the Dravidian and indo-European languages getting the b/bh/p/ph series (and parallel ones, including retroflex). I don’t know whether or not similar things happened in southeast and east Asia.
I live in Vietnam, so I wasn't really talking about immigrants, though I guess given the context of Milan's post I can see why all the American commenters are going in that direction.
If you go into any hotel near the main tourist areas of Saigon or Hanoi every single staff will have a name tag saying "Iris" or "Ruth" instead of their actual name.
That's more the kind of dynamic I was originally referring to
I understood, yea. I think the same set of rationales applies. Your Romanization makes fuck-all sense to someone who speaks a language which uses a Latin alphabet natively, and therefore the chances of a foreigner who doesn't have any knowledge of Vietnamese getting names right is basically nil. Bahasa and Hindi romanizations are just much more intelligible to Europeans and Americans.
The same is true in Mandarin; folks in service jobs where they deal with foreign tourists basically all have an "English name" they use, because otherwise they're not even going to recognize when someone is calling for their attention because of the butchery their name will be subjected to.
My pronunciation of Vietnamese names and words was helped a lot when the light went off over my head that the transliteration system for Vietnamese to the Latin alphabet was done by French-speakers.
Japanese-Americans adopt Anglo names. My grandma Hatsuko became Connie, my grandpa Abo became John, and they named their children Nancy, Tammy and Michael. It’s a result of the forced assimilation that came from the internments.
In fact, it’s usually easy to tell if a Japanese-American’s family came over before of after WWII based on whether they have a Japanese name.
Huh that’s funny, it’s different in my family. The generation that went to the camps all kept their Japanese names. They did all give their kids Anglo names though.
I’ve wondered about this but in a slightly different way - I find it interesting which ethnic groups “assimilate” their names in America and which ones don’t. My sense is that most East Asian parents who have kids in the US give them “English” names. Same with southern Europeans (eg most people with Italian last names are not named Giuseppe and most people of Greek descent aren’t Ioannis) and Jews and Armenians. My sense is Latinos are starting to shift this way as well.
Yet most south Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Muslim Arabs, etc) seem to give their kids ethnic names - even those who have been in the US for a long time. You don’t see a lot of Craig Patels walking around.
I’m curious why this is - it seems maladaptive, for lack of a better term, and like a potential hindrance to success. Of course there are lots of reasons to choose a name, but I wonder if Milan would have felt like less of an outsider growing up if his name had just been “Dylan”
I don’t think I would. I don’t want to be a Dylan. Who would I be fooling? When people see me walking down the street they don’t see a Dylan. I’m making my peace with that.
If you were to see someone who looks like yourself walking down the street - who would you see? If they said their name was Dylan, would you be offended, disappointed, happy, ambivalent, apathetic?
I find this fascinating because I totally get not wanting to be Dylan because you're Milan - its who you are!. Just like I wouldn't want to be Milan because I'm John. Having a different name would make me someone else. I like being who I am and expect you feel the same about being Milan. But the idea that taking a name is somehow "fooling someone" or someone else wouldn't "see a Dylan" is so contrary to how I think that its surprising/shocking to see you write it.
Did your family ever talk about how your name would be pronounced 'Milon' in Bengali? Even within India, there's so much variance. For example, my daughter's name starts with an 'S' which is a sound that doesn't exist in Bangla. My grandmother would've pronounced it as starting with 'Sh'.
Haha I never said there were none! It was interesting reading Colin’s comment with the story behind his name - I’m just surprised more parents don’t think the same way.
I think it’s because we use the English alphabet regularly. I’m differentiating that from “Latin” alphabet. I’ve met french Indians who have “French-y” names.
So many kids in India don’t know how to write their own name in their mother tongue. I still can’t pick a spelling in Devanagari Hindi, but I am confident with my name in English.
It’s this unique effect of The British not being zealous with proselytization (unlike the Spanish), and using English, that will have it so Indians can use their ethnic names. We can’t have names from the Christian bible because many of us are not Christian.
That’s interesting, but doesn’t feel like it addresses why Indian parents in the US give their kids “foreign sounding” names instead of “American sounding” names.
Like even your last point makes my point. Why can’t you have a name from the Christian bible (whatever that means?) - lots of Jewish people and East Asian (non-Christian) people have English names that you’d probably say are “Christian”. It seems like South Asians are uniquely reluctant to use “typical” American names. I find that somewhat surprising.
Hey hey now - those biblical names are Jewish all the way through!
But it does seem common to choose a name that straddles both cultures - Sonia, Rena, and Sara are common all across the Middle East and South Asia, for example.
I mean I’m a Jewish guy named Andrew so I do have a bit of first hand experience! It derives from Greek and apparently it was common among Hellenized Jews in the time of Jesus, but it’s definitely not a “Jewish” name. That’s probably true of most of the names of early Christians.
You functionally can’t go by most Chinese names in the US (people will throw darts at barely-phonetically-adjacent walls). But the romanization->phonetic pronunciation of Indian names is usually ~okay.
I think we are dancing around an obvious contributor - religion is at least part of the answer. Would be interesting to see if Christian Indians are more likely to give their children anglicanized names vs Hindu/Sikh/Muslim parents. Immigrants leave their country behind, but take their religious beliefs with them.
In extremely diverse India, name are signifier you about your religion, language, ethnicity, your caste (or opposition to it), or even village. There are tons of Indians who have Christian names, and it is a signifier back home. Dylan is a common name in Kerala.
It is maladaptive and you get upset with your parents about it when you’re young. I think part of it is pride and naming convention.
Or to paraphrase another commenter - most immigrants leave their country behind and give their kids Anglicized names in America. Indians, for whatever reason, largely don’t. From the outside in, this seems strange.
Some cultures value names more than others, when deciding what to drop when they immigrate? My hunch above is for why names matter. I also think Indians are, compared to East Asians, uniquely used to culturally diverse societies back home - so maybe they feel less of a 'push' when they immigrate elsewhere?
Also, lot of Japanese Americans had Japanese first names prior to WW2. Some Eastern Europeans name their kid Vlad or Anastasia. Some names also become less ethnic over time like Jonah, Ruth, or Hannah. Some seem to be coded as ethnic again, like Oscar. So not sure that its fully unique but I grant that the level of doing so may be unique.
China has a well-ingrained cultural tradition of people having different names in different cultural contexts, and Chinese speakers in English-influenced places in Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) quite frequently have english names alongside their Chinese nanes. So I don't think that it has too much to do with assimilating to western culture particularly.
I think it's pretty likely that Antonio would go by Tony. And that nickname almost sounds Italian due to so many of his predecessor Antonios doing the same thing (though it's not, as Mr. Blair demonstrates).
And while I can't imagine him having an opportunity to visit Boise any time soon, if he did we definitely owe him a toast and a round to treat him right here.
One day I asked Milan if there could be a guinea pig appreciation post on guinea pig appreciation day, which is also my girlfriends birthday (who loves guinea pigs), and on July 16 Milan actually put up a photo of a couple of guinea pigs, calling them magnificent clunkers.
You will be missed, thank you for the emotions and good luck for the future!
Thanks for your two years of service to Slow Boring, and thanks for writing this essay.
It never occurred to me to think of "Bobby" as a daak naam. Thanks for showing me that. I agree with you that it's weird for him to use it in public. But I've always found it gross when people who are generally aligned with me ideologically conspicuously call Jindal "Piyush" to other him.
I personally wouldn't consider what Haley did with regard to her given name to even be changing it -- there's a long history of Anglo-American politicians using their middle names or nicknames professionally. See, e.g., Willard Mitt Romney, John Ellis Bush ("JEB"), etc. (This article on the subject of politicians going by non-birth names cites research that people are perceived as more likeable when their names are easily pronouncible, BTW: https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/01/politics-candidates-names/13459183/ )
Yeppp that would be true but she did convert (which is kind of a big deal for Hindus) and she did marry a white guy (again, not a big deal for me, but some idiots view that as “race traitorship” or whatever).
Weirdest part is Nikki has always been an Indian American staple, I remember the old song “Neil and Nikki” which was on my ipod that I got from a cousin.
Barack sounds more serious than Barry. Imagine “Prof. Barack Obama” versus “Prof. Barry Obama.” It’s also not phonologically or orthographically confusing.
“Vote for Vivek” works better than “Vote for Klobuchar,” as well.
That’s interesting that “Bobby” is a daak naam! I had been familiar with the concept of there being a different name members of your family use than others (which always confused me since my aunts and uncles and cousins all had that) but I didn’t know the term.
This is a lovely piece and I'll be sorry to see you go, but wish you success in your next venture!
It's funny that you mention Nikki Haley towards the end. I've been seeing some pieces written by liberals that will refer to her as "Nimrata" and it always reminds me of when republicans would emphasize "Barack HUSSEIN Obama". In both cases, they are the person's actual name, and I do understand that feeling that someone is trying to be someone or something that they are not. But to me these examples illustrate how important it is to just accept what someone wants to be called. Just imagine someone introducing himself as "Matt" in the office and shouting "Your name is MATTHEW and don't you forget it!" or something ridiculous like that.
Nice piece, kid. It's been a pleasure living under your benevolent dictatorship.
I am not sure you appreciate the violence you inflicted on this readership by specifying your birth year as 2003. We always knew as an intellectual exercise inferred from your public collegiate matriculation, but still!
Best of luck! May the gainz be ever in your favor
We old, son.
The part where he was like "oh those olden days after Obama but before Aziz Ansari" killed me. That was like a week in grad school, how can you tell them apart???
Amazing post, Milan. As an Indian guy in his 20s, a lot of it resonated, maybe more so than I’d like, especially the bit about how Asian men are presented in our culture as undateable losers.
FWIW, I’ve been really heartened at how the mainstream culture is shifting to present Asian men as “attractive.” Simu Liu being in Shang Chi and Barbie is exciting!
The Kumail getting swole thing was first, right? When the historical record of the acceptance of Southeast Asian men in pop culture gets written, he’s gotta be up there as one of the most important ones. I didn’t like him when I was in my twenties because I was more into angry Hari Kondabolu rather than nice guy Kumail Nanjiani.
This is both Naveen Andrews and Senthil Ramamurthy erasure from the 2000s. I really hated that the former got reintroduced to the current generation, only to play a paunchy creepy and pathetic Sunny in that Elizabeth Holmes series.
Milan - you’re a good writer and an ambitious person. That’s great. There are different ways to look at one’s life without compromise. There’s no fitting in for anyone anywhere. In my town, the only thing worse than a Jew is a Jew married to a Chinese. And that’s just fine! When you’re a Jew you don’t have waste time wondering if your neighbors will kill you. I knew that growing up in the Jewish neighborhood I grew up in…in the old country, 1960s and 70s Brooklyn, and I experienced that in multicultural Cambridge MA too, where i was an anthropologist, researching and observing amongst them urban dwellers — Harvard, MIT, Leslie, BU; students, faculty, groundskeepers, sweepers…no different. But you don’t have to be a Jew or Chinese or Bobby, Nikki, Kamala, Vivek, or you. Irish Italian Malaysian Appalachian…whomever is living next to you…the same. 3 clicks away from using children for meat, 3 clicks away from working together to build something useful and exuberant.
Give up the fairy tale. “Predominant culture” - there isn’t one. The culture is a mix and one has to navigate through it…one can glide or one can flail; one can choose - with delight or with resentment. Yeah, out work, out lift them,out do them. But who is them? I say this to my own 1/2 jew 1/2 chinese kid: just work hard, ignore the ignorant, and if ‘they’ come after you, in a way you can’t ignore, well then you have to crush them. So easy. Dont waste time on hand wringing.
The focus on ‘fitting in’, it’s a myth of America. What’s great here is that we MOSTLY don’t kill each other. A giant improvement. And that there is a sizable population of peoples here who ARE embracing of others.
This conversation, here on Slow Boring, well really it’s So Boring. The institutional capture around it - keeps the conversation and effort focused away from getting better. A better trajectory - ‘what did we do today to make things work a little better’
I don’t resonate with this at all. I definitely feel, as a white straight guy, that I fit in, and Milan’s experiences of not fitting in are highly distinct from anything I’ve encountered. I think his piece is more grounded in reality than what you’ve written here.
As a white gay guy it's easy for me to see the difference. I always feel like I fit in except in this one way that always feels a bit different. And I say that as someone who has never encountered significant personal homophobia.
Now I can agree that America makes it easy for me to be accepted, as I think the poster meant. But I can tell the difference where I just fit in and where I stand out.
As a gay half Indian guy I can see a lot about how both identities have progressed over my life. In addition to Hasan Minhaj and Aziz Ansari and Vivek Ramaswamy and Kamala Harris and the other Indian people that are now models of one sort or another, I also see Neil Patrick Harris and Sam Altman and Janelle Monae and other queer people that are now models of one sort or another. It doesn’t matter that not all of these people are ones that I like - if anything it’s actually better that there are enough now that they are starting to represent a whole spectrum rather than just one way to be.
Hmm, that's interesting, I guess it's a sign of how much better things are that LGB public figures are increasingly known for things other than being gay.
To put my own personal twist on this, the only common trait I can think of that could possible put me in a minority status was being raised atheist. I never had any problem with this in Boise, since there isn't one dominant religion here. But if I moved to, say, the Deep South...who knows?
I grew up Jewish in north central Florida in the 50s and 60s. We few Jews (two of us in my elementary school) were definitely the odd men out, existing in a deeply Christian culture where the standard second question one is asked is "what church do you go to?" But it wasn't a big deal because -- I think -- the Christian society as it existed then was so secure (or devoted their antagonistic energies toward Blacks) that it couldn't be bothered by the odd Jew. But not for a moment did we doubt that we were on the outside looking in.
Today? I'm not sure. The society has grown more tolerant, but the Christian community has gotten to feel more embattled and aggressive.
I remember looking at a Vanderbilt University list in the late 90s for grad roommates that the department had on hand and seeing "Christians Only" being a prominent criteria for many people. It was awkward when the admin would recommend someone and I saw that stiupulation in their record. I had never seen that coming from my northeastern undergrad.
Yeah, I have never been asked the "what church do you go to?" question, and it seems like such a bizarre question to ask.
It's not something I had gotten before, but we just moved to a neighborhood on the edge of suburban/rural Ohio, and my boyfriend told me that one of our new neighbors asked him that in their first conversation.
I grew up atheist (well, from ~10 years old) in Alabama.
I was given a little bit of sh** in middle school and high school, but it was usually triggered by me being a very obnoxious and in-your-face kind of atheist kid.
That was ~2000. I can only imagine it has improved since then.
I do get the impression that it would have been different in the 80s, though.
I was decidedly *not* in your face about it: I was more like the typical atheist who just doesn't think about this stuff that much.
This is interesting because sometimes I get the idea that straight white guys never feel like they fit in because there are so many cultural standards for "masculinity" that every guy is going to fall short one way or another. (This is not to say I haven't known men who were 100% comfortable with themselves nevertheless.)
I may have benefited by growing up in a pretty liberal area and going to a high school that had plenty of alternative subcultures one could belong to.
How many generations has your family been in America? I’m perceived as white and it resonates with me. Milan’s perception of “whites people” frankly seems to me to reflect his own idealized projection of how the grass is greener for others than any objective reality
I didn't read Milan as saying that no white people experience the things he's talking about, though maybe I overlooked something. I was responding to Robert, who wrote, "There’s no fitting in for anyone anywhere. … “Predominant culture” - there isn’t one. … The focus on ‘fitting in’, it’s a myth of America." I think all of these things Robert said are not true. The fact that you yourself don't always feel you fit in doesn't contradict my point, which is that I myself (with a family that, yes, has been in the country for many generations—thats kind of the point I'm making) definitely feel I fit in and always have, and I think a lot of people who are part of the majority culture feel the same way.
I think it would behoove you to attempt a little generosity in your reading of Milan.
I'm sure Milan doesn't mean to imply that all non whites feel like him—it's true he generalizes, but almost no generalization is meant to be universal. I think the idea that the piece implies that no white person feels this way is not only "not indisputable" but basically unsupportable, though again, point out to me anything I'm missing.
Regarding your last sentence: it's simply not a universal experience. I don't share the experience; I think I've said this three times now. And I don't have any reason to think that anyone in my family shared the experience either.
What I meant by universal is typically experienced by immigrants across time, place and race.
There's millions of white nerdy kids that also felt like they didn't fit in
Sure, but what of that? The claim was "no one fits in anywhere" and that's just obviously untrue.
The idea that there aren’t central or hegemonic tendencies in American culture seems just…downright bizarre for a social scientist to believe. It’s true that American society is unusually pluralistic, but if you’re far from one of the modal clusters in some salient and perceptible trait, people will notice and at least sometimes react negatively.
Yes, i was being a bit tongue in cheek there, and i'm not really a social scientist [and uh, replication problem, which even Kahneman says about his own work, is a problem. It's a bunch of great ideas though, and that's enough] . I spent a year in Cambridge talking to everyone (while my son went to a school program there for a year, which was a ridiculous bust, but since i had the time and interest to walk around and see what the culture was, i did). 'people will notice and ...react' - that's the issue right here fer me...i'm super outlier because i gave no fux in my career years, and still dont. I did work that people said couldn't be done; and while i'm no teacher, except to my kid, most people who spent any amount of time working with me, made money, learned a ton, and then went on to do similar [in construction, not academia]. The bar is low, you just have to be a little bit better than mediocre; and give no fux (but treat people well). I learned all i needed to know in the boyscouts and from American Youth Hostels. What 'professional education' has devolved into...is appalling. And the bulk of professional education now = starts with identity based sorting. We're so deep in it, we're swimming in it, and we don't notice. So I find it troubling when there's so much attention on 'who looks like who'. Nobody really looks like anyone else if you go a little deeper. In other words...we're shallow?
I disagree. I live in a Houston suburb - not the super diverse kind like Sugar Land - and it is really obvious that white Baptists named Jack Smith are going to have a much easier time getting elected to city council or the school board than atheists with a weird name like mine. There really is a predominant culture and it's not easy when you don't fit in.
Or it IS easy when you don't fit in. Why 'fit in'? That said....there are many different ways to be; i'm fine not 'fitting in' / my career was and is fine, my sense of belonging is that i belong to various organizations and groups where i do 'make a difference', my kid is fine. Not 'fitting in' hasn't harmed me in any way and on net, i think it's been positive for my geographic and professional communities. If i had wanted to 'fit in' yes, it would have been a struggle, because: old boys network here, old church networks, old school networks, old Harvard/Yale peoples here too. But i have no need or desire for acceptance; and if people don't 'look like me', and/or i don't see 'people who look like me', it don't bother me not at all.
I get the general point about trusting yourself to deal with life, but disagree that anything about this is boring. It's infinitely interesting to find out in particular about various ways that people don't "fit in." Sometimes those ways clump together in terms of ethnic background (or even simply in terms of being first-generation: I'm fascinated with accounts of cultural tensions between one's immigrant parents and one's own social environment, because they indicate so many things about cultures in general.)
Of course most of us (except for Tom Hitchner below who feels like he fits in, which I find intriguing on its own) have found ways to deal greater and lesser degrees of not fitting in. And yes, there's a definite unhealthy trend among the immature to make "not fitting in" the defining characteristic of their selfhood.
But that's not what Milan is doing here. As his posts are about to go to the (still-retrievable) Archive In The Sky he's retroactively giving us more information about some important aspects of his intellectual perspective, which may prove useful to people like me who are always keenly interested in the personalities behind the ideas.
What's 'boring' to me [and it was a little glib], is one's physical identity is all or has such great primacy. You look X, so then Y. Yeah sure, that's perhaps the first thing, and it's really easy. That Identity / victim / trauma / insult / insensitive - the whole axis is just...simplistic and, well, boring. Because we immediately CAN get past that, and often do, or used to, as a culture. But now that simplistic identity behavior is constantly being pushed by media and politics; and its reductiveness is foolish. But it allows us to never talk or focus first on financial class and money issues which are far larger classifiers than: you look X so you must Y. Ones aspect and affect are more influenced by money and 'class' than 'you look X so Y'. Unless the X is, 'you look like you earn 150k so therefore Y'. Not talking about money allows us to continue to drive wages down and extract money from labor, instead of a more reasonable distribution of dividends from labor capital and innovation.
Don't worry, everyone will be bored with this pretty soon. I certainly enjoy pushing back along the same lines as yours, but I've always read it as an ephemeral trend that the kids will grow out of as they learn to navigate real life. Media and politics will eventually follow (they can be a bit slow on the uptake.)
As a 65-year-old Irish Catholic (who nowadays just gets taken for a generic white guy), you may be surprised -- no, shocked -- to learn that I shared many of your insecurities about growing up in a predominantly mainline Protestant culture. (And my family has been living in America since before the Civil War!) I won't go into all of it -- I could write a lengthy blog post of my own -- but my son, for example, who also has a typical Irish name was once on the no-fly list too. (He must have shared a name with someone from the IRA.) As for role models growing up, the Kennedys? Talk about aping WASP culture! My parents hated the Kennedys! And stereotypes about the Irish? What's the first thing that comes to your mind, a drunken reveler on St. Patrick's Day? A cop? A firefighter? As I said, I could go on and on. But I guess the whole point is that unless your ancestors came over on the Mayflower you probably share some of these insecurities too. It's all a part of the American experience.
My dad is from a mostly-Irish American Catholic family and is about your age; I find the similarities and differences between the ways you talk about your experience and identity interesting.
He tends to talk about being an Irish Catholic as a distinction that was visible but already fading even when he was a kid, and he generally sees himself as a pretty typical/paradigmatic Northeastern US upper middle class professional— he sees himself as a “normal” American, and the WASP blue bloods as a sort of a decadent and out-of-touch aristocracy.
I wonder why his perspective is different from yours. I’d guess that his skepticism of, and consequent psychological distance from, the Catholic Church as an institution played a part— as did marrying a (mostly) ethnic German Protestant woman from the Midwest. Social mobility timing might have played a role too— my dad’s dad was a working class guy who became an Army officer during the war, and went on to be a white collar manager, so the psychodrama of integrating into a more hegemonic US culture might have hit a generation earlier.
I imagine that “the point where I don’t feel like The Other anymore” will hit in different generations for different members of more recent immigrant groups too (and might be tougher for people who look more visibly different from the population average, depending on how much intermarriage there is etc)
Sorry, Mtracy84, history began circa 1993. Anything before that was part of the dark ages, before the written word.
I hope Milan is reading these comments.
I was assigned an Indian first name at birth (Deva) because my white patents were Hari Krishnas. It sucked. I was teased mercilessly and legally changed it to David when I was six. It sucked despite having white skin and would have sucked more if I had brown skin.
And yet the kids teasing me were other five years olds in a racially diverse Montessori school in Greenbelt, Maryland. We had an Indian girl in my class and one of the teachers and several of the students were black. The other kids were not indoctrinated racists, they were just acting out human nature.
The jokes you hear on TV are more politically correct than 20 years ago and yet mental illness has increased. People worry more about bullying even though it is happening less. A big part of me thinks that kids are always going to form status hierarchies, only a few boys can date the cutest girls, and the thrust of public policy should be making sure the people on the bottom don’t get smushed.
Milan’s otherness has decreased, not because of any intentional public policy, but because the Indian American community has multiplied and flourished, and also because he is broad minded enough to view Hindus as ethnic cousins when he is (at least part) Sikh.
I don’t want to dismiss the pain Milan has experienced, but I do think otherness is often better lived than ignored or eradicated.
"A big part of me thinks that kids are always going to form status hierarchies, only a few boys can date the cutest girls"
So true -
It really is scary how kids can trend down mean paths quickly due to simple human nature, and how it's highly important to cut off that meanness right at the pass when it happens.
Zooming in on a small part of your well written comment: I think mental illness increasing/PC jokes decreasing is circumstantial correlation at best.
agree, but it certainly proves that politically incorrect jokes probably are not a cause of mental illness
My first name is Colin in part because my dad was worried that if I had a traditional Indian name it would hurt my ability to get jobs later in life. Have very much the same relationship to Obama you do (worked on the campaign and for DNC in part because of this same feeling).
Anecdote about the dating issue. I’ll be honest, I’often wondered when I was single that if I wasn’t Indian would I have had more success in my dating life. I had one incident where I’m fairly certain a girl did not end up going on a date with me because her friend had questions about my background (long story a long time ago so a variety of reasons best to keep things vague). And it was hard not to then wonder after that if a girl didn’t like me because I said something stupid or because of…something else. Reality is, majority of the time the likely proximate reason is I do not exactly have game and the girl in question would not have been interested no matter what my background.
On a more serious note. I ask people on here to read this anecdote and ask yourself how this might apply to interactions between black Americans and the police. When you watch videos and a police shooting or cases of saying tasering a band leader in Alabama and a lot of people’s first reaction is “well why is this person talking back and not complying. If they just followed all of the police’s instructions none of this happens”. And you know what, in many of these cases, I think you can absolutely say that this person talking back or getting angry and not wanting to comply was NOT a great move and in a lot of cases possibly unwarranted given realities of the situation (in a lot cases, the person in question really was doing something wrong). But I really ask you consider that in a ton of cases, the person in question is responding and reacting to let’s just say previous questionable interactions with police and just how often these questionable interactions that don’t involve a shooting or tasering or anything caught on tape happen depressingly often.
I don't know, I see some of these interactions people have with police and I probably would never dream of doing or saying some of these things with the public librarian, much less a police officer.
I have long considered the police shooting eruptions to be mostly a proxy battle over police harassment, which is what is actually motivating people to be pissed off on a totally non-ideological level.
As a Bengali mom who moved to Cambridge at 13, now with half Indian kids, it was neat to read this. I have a dak naam but never gave one to my kids. But I did drag them to the local Durga pujos in middle school gyms when they were growing up. I’ve tried to cook machher jhol bhat to keep the culinary traditions alive. My older one is your age with a name that is mispronounced all the time. I can only hope we aren’t messing you kids up.
Anyway, your parents did a fantastic job with you and I wish you all the best in your adventures ahead. Remember, one out of every 6 humans is Indian. There will be more of us here before you know it.
As a kid I used to hate going to Indian functions but I’m glad we did it and wish I had paid more attention and had more connection to the social and cultural aspects.
Best wishes Milan on the road ahead. Thank you for sharing this genuinely moving personal story.
I firmly believe that you and your family have a quintessentially American story- you ARE America, even when some people try to obscure that. I really do think these words will inspire future kids who feel what you felt, and that there is some hope that things will be better for them.
In the words of your hero: "That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others ... America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes ... We honor those who walked so we could run. We must run so our children soar!"
I think "lived experience" is a flawed concept, but when I see comment sections like this it does make me think that it's often unfairly dismissed in its entirety. Clearly, while this doesn't apply to every member of a group, there's some salience to the idea that experiences between groups can be just *different* in difficult-to-quantify ways, and there's a lot of back and forth about how someone's subjective experience is actually wrong and they're just being paranoid based on race. It really is a strange dynamic to see so many people try to invalidate an experience that they have only a window into instead of a lifetime into, and it seems to only come out in force over identity politics.
Imagine if someone said "I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." It would be weird!
No wonder people in identity groups fall back on saying their lived experience is sacrosanct and beyond reproach. It seems like an overcompensation for the fact that their relaying of direct experience is considered a prime target for debate by people who don't have that direct experience.
Thank you for this comment. Is it my imagination or have the normie Democrats around here been slowly getting replaced by libertarians and Wes Yang superfans?
I’d say there’s been a shift even since I joined in 2021. I think the desire to criticize the excesses of the far left in this comment section brought a lot of people who want to just bash the woke and has caused some political drift towards the right.
I'm against the excesses of the far left but ... I'm kinda tired about the complaining about them here too.
One of my favorite Scott Alexander insights: "if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." (I'm not saying Matt tried to found such a community, nor are there that many "witches" here compared to some places, it's just a very light instance of the same issue.)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
The libertarian shift has to be a law of internet communities or something, because Matt's writing evinces approximately zero sympathy for it.
I don't think that's accurate on Matt's writing. One of his leading takes, YIMBYism, is very libertarian accessible and adjacent on the grounds of land development being too regulated by the government.
Very fair, in my head I was basically thinking of libertarianism ex-YIMBY. Some concrete examples are the "regulate porn" "regulate gambling" and "raise the alcohol tax" takes.
Finally, allow me to link to one of my favorite Matt takes of all time: https://slate.com/business/2013/03/mercatus-freedom-map-and-the-fallacies-of-libertarianism.html
"The much more plausible explanation is that no normal person’s experience of freedom tracks the conclusion that New York is less free than South Dakota. You can, obviously, do a much wider range of things in New York than in South Dakota. People attempting to construct some alternate definition of freedom that will better-track the libertarian political program will try and fail to put together a metaphysically workable distinction between “negative” and “positive” freedoms that immediately collapses in the face of air pollution, unsafe driving, lawsuits, etc."
White dudes read these sites, white dudes comment, and where you find white dudes...
You find libertarians? I feel like not so long ago someone was saying libertarianism is only white guys and I went googling for "prominent libertarians" and found every race and ethnicity and social class background represented. But even if it was true, it doesn't feel like a great way to take a dig at a philosophy.
In any case is this even the right topic? I feel like the take is more that the site has gotten more crank and reactionary or something, not libertarian in any way I find meaningful. But that said, people have been saying "it's getting more right wing" since I signed up and when I go baac and look at old comments they don't really feel all that different.
the irony is that this comments section (obviously a lot different people back in 2021 and now) went really 'lived experience' and 'feelings' for this post about selective schools:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-misguided-exam-school-debate/comments
Lived experience isn't everything but its not nothing!
I don’t think the reply to “I felt like an outsider at school because I listened to goth music and hated sports" and many people who barely know them piled in to say "you only felt like an outsider because you were self-obsessed, no one cares about sports or music, besides sometimes people made fun of me too." Is weird. In the right context it identifies the insecurity and compensatory narcissism of adolescence. With respect, that is, at least in part, what Milan is expressing.
re: names. I live in Vietnam and one thing I've always wondered about is which cultures adopt "American" names and which don't. Here in Vietnam it is very common to find out that "Joe" is really "Phi" and than "Nancy" is really "Duyên". But you would never (I think?) find an Italian named Antonio going by Andy or a Swedish Bjorn going by Bobby. Japanese never seem to adopt Anglo-names. I wonder if that used to be different in the 1950s and 1960s? I don't remember really meeting any Indonesians who have swapped in Anglo-names for their Agung or Indah. I don't have much experience with Africa but I don't really remember meeting a lot of people with Anglo-names from there. They seem happy to rock with Kofi or Afua.
As an aside: in Vietnam there is a law that in practice means you have to have a Vietnamese name to have Vietnamese citizenship. You would be surprised (well, probably not) at the number of mixed-marriages where the husband (because it's always a foreigner husband...) is indignant that they can't give their kid a Western name on their Vietnamese passport.
Jews almost always have a name that fits into the local culture, plus a Hebrew name that’s used for religious and communal purposes. My understanding is many Chinese do the same. And you mentioned Kofi - many Ghanaians have an English name on top of their day name (Kofi just means you’re a male born on Friday).
And then there’s the long history of anglicizing surnames to make them more pronounceable (and in our case, less obviously Jewish).
Nobody should have to anglicize their name to avoid prejudice. But anglicizing for that reason, or just for easy pronounceability, is as American as apple pie. Those Hungarian and Polish names don’t become easier for people to sound out, even if you’ve been here for five generations. So I always felt a little bad that Niki Haley and Bobby Jindal took heat for their names. They’re just doing what everyone else has.
For normie American Jews, any Hebrew name is not used for “communal purposes.” If a specified Hebrew name exists as anything other than a direct translation of someone’s given name, it’s trotted out for the Bar Mitzvah and forgotten.
I’ve always felt that “make a good faith, substantial effort to correctly pronounce peoples’ names” was a place where the woke left was... obviously correct
Emphatically yes, especially teachers. But equally emphatically, some people WILL inevitably screw up your name and it's best not to take it personally. My five-letter Polish surname is mispronounced and misspelled so often that I seldom even bother correcting it. Because who cares? My boss mispronounced it for a year and I didn't care. (If someone is deliberately mocking with their mispronunciation, that's a different story.)
There are real injustices in the world. This ain't one of them.
Was it Borat?
High five!
One of the stupidest things that people seem to find acceptable is going “HAHA BORAT” about Kazakhs.
Some of the immigrants I've met who use American nicknames do so because their actual name has sounds in it that aren't present in English - I'd bet its in general more common for those cultures.
Yes. I went to high school in Kentucky with friends whose parents had left Laos and Cambodia when they were tiny (for obvious 1970s reasons). They chose Americanized names which some people called them by and some didn’t. When I was at their houses, their parents never, ever called them those names. I wondered at the time if they were even aware of their kids having self-applied the Americanized names.
I grew up in a college town in rural Illinois, so kind of a culture clash between high education and rural America. There were loads of people from all over the world, and many of them ended up staying and raising kids in the area.
It was pretty standard there that everyone adopted an “English” first name and especially they gave them to their kids.
I had a friend, Andy, whose East Asian parents invited my family for dinner and taught us how to use chop sticks. I remember they said they specifically they wanted their son to be American, and wanted his name to be easy for his friends and teachers.
And I remember afterwards my parents saying how sweet that was, and my dad saying how honored he was to live in a place where people came from all over the world, and how they brought their culture with them, but also made the effort to merge into ours. “That’s the melting pot.”
I obviously don’t know how Andy or his family really felt deep down. But they seemed happy, and I know they were well-liked and spoken kindly of in the community.
I share this just to say, I think there’s a positive version of making an effort to blend in to your new home. Emphasis on *blend*, as my Dad saw it, bring your culture with you and share it proudly, but also offer some signs of respect and appreciation for the place you’re joining. It certainly doesn’t need to be names. But, if it is, I don’t think we should assume that this necessarily comes from a bad place.
Interestingly, in the old days all Europeans used to translate their names in other countries. That's why we know them as John Calvin and Christopher Columbus instead of Jean Calvin and Cristoforo Colombo. Today they only do that for royals and popes.
Anyway, I actually don't think immigrants from any country "adopt" anglo names in large number. Where the rubber hits the road is what they name their kids. In that, Indians stand out in sticking with Indian names. Probably a combination of: how recently they came over, how successful they are, and the fact that Indian names are pretty pronounceable in English.
I think there was a shift in the metaphysical view of names that occurred sometime in the 20th century. The older, and in my opinion more sensible, view seems to have been that the names Anthony and Antonio, e.g., were exactly the same name, the former being the English of it and the latter being the Spanish (or Italian). Antonio becomes Anthony in English (vice versa) just as Venezia becomes Venice or chiesa becomes church.
But this breaks down when names outside the greater European nominative universe are introduced. There isn't a longstanding English form of traditional Indian or Chinese names. And then somewhere along the way I think the idea that an American and a Mexican have the same name in different languages shifted subtly to the idea that they simply have two different names. My grandmother, a Mexican woman, is named Maria Luisa. But in school in the 1930s she was called Mary-Lou. I think this would be seen as wrong, maybe even offensive now. But I don't really think it is, it's just a different implicit theory of what a name is.
It’s interesting that this convention seems to have been less consistent in English than in other European languages (Shakespeare unapologetically gives characters Spanish, French, and Italian names, for example.)
Also, in the rest of Europe, you can sort of pinpoint the shift sometime in the late 19th century (ie: Bel Canto opera gives English-speaking characters and historical figures Italian names— “Lucia di Lammermoor” or “Maria Stuarda”, but the late 19th/early 20th century Puccini is happy to have characters named “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton” and “Dick Johnson.”
Koreans are also fairly successful and came relatively recently, but you’re much more likely to see a “Randall Park” than, say, a “Hyun-Jin Park” as the kid of a Korean immigrant. So I’m not sure how much that’s a factor in Indians largely sticking with “old country” names.
Doesn't that go to the "pretty pronounceable" issue as evan bear suggested? (I've seen this point brought up elsewhere before -- because of the shared Indo-European background of English and most north Indian languages at least, many Indian names are often more intuitively pronounceable by English-speakers than names from East Asian languages.)
Ehh maybe but there are lots of pronounceable East Asian names - no one really has a problem saying Ichiro Suzuki or Yao Ming.
Though the ao letter combination is very rare in English, even if the diphthong is not.
Yao is his family name so having an Anglicized first name wouldn’t fix that regardless!
But anyways let’s not act like all East Asian names are somehow unpronounceable.
What is the case is that giving your kid a traditional East Asian name in North America effectively “others” them, so most East Asian parents don’t do it. Indian parents, for whatever reason, don’t seem bothered by this.
Japanese people are not really like other East Asian groups because (1) there are a lot fewer of them here, (2) a large percentage of those who are here came over much longer ago than other groups, (3) their names are as a rule much easier to pronounce in English than other East Asian names are. I would not even include them in the analysis as it's just apples and oranges for a whole host of reasons.
Chinese names are pretty frequently butchered. Yes, there are some that are easier for anglos to pronounce than others, but I would not generalize from a handful of celebrities you're familiar with.
No, your factual premises are wrong. Koreans started coming over in large number a decade or two earlier than Indians did. Both groups have been successful in this country, but Koreans came in under a less selective regime - more nurses and such, fewer computer programmers - and during less tolerant times. Korean names are also harder to pronounce than Indian names are. These are all marginal differences, not black and white, but they add up.
Another factor I didn't mention but I think someone else here alluded to is that a lot of Indians already use English in India so the idea of using an Indian name in English doesn't seem unusual. Whereas a Chinese person coming over is more likely to see using an English name as simply a normal function of switching to a different language.
I had the same thought. I grew up straddling Chinese and American culture and every Chinese family I knew gave their kids a fairly traditional American name. Same for me in reverse - when I lived in China I used a Chinese name. Good luck with a “Z” in Chinese.
I feel like I don’t see too many Europeans in the US, but the ones I know also went by (or got) nicknames or transliterations. At least the men. Justinus became Justin, one guy with two first names and two last names just became “Bull” which is badass. Even my own last name (crazy Germans not spelling things normally) gets confusing to anyone who sees it. I end up becoming Conan (read: Barbarian) which is fun, though.
What we call ourselves has immense influence on how others perceived us and says something about our own priorities. Do we prioritize fitting in or standing out? Are we formal or casual? Do we correct mispronunciation or go with the flow?
And then of course this is signaled again in what people name their kids. It looks like Nikki Haley’s are Rena and Nalin; Bobby Jindal’s are Slade, Shaan, and Selia. Take that for what you will.
My dad came from Scandinavia and became John because his name was too foreign. My Scandinavian but now not-uncommon name is theoretically pronounceable but I still have to give people 3 chances to get it right before I give up and accept they will not get it. We gave our kids Anglo, easy names, but they have a Hispanic surname. (Oh, and one of them is ethnically Asian, adopted. Sometimes people get very confused. That kid did not enjoy explaining why they had a "Mexican" name). All this is to say that the naming thing isn't strictly tied to non-white, ethnic-sounding names, though being non-white adds a layer of confusion and having a last name that codes for an ethnically disfavored group is not fun.
My last name is as British as they come, the ancestors who gave it to me having been here since 1680 or so.
But since it's Scottish, no one gets it right, despite similarity to a cluster of common Irish last names that people do know how to pronounce in the US.
Life is weird.
People ask me sometimes how to pronounce my last name, and, having been divorced from its origins for over 150 years, it occurs to me I have no idea how it "should" be pronounced.
Mine is throughly Anglicized, such that though I know how it was pronounced I only ever do so when someone asks why it’s spelled how it is as part of the explanation.
Same with me, except it's five letters. There's two common ways people mispronounce it, a third way that our family always uses but is also a butchering from the fourth way that you'd say it in German.
I'm trying to think of what that might be but the only four-letter German surnames I'm aware of are pretty simple to pronounce. Beck, Koch, Hahn...
I was going to guess "Auer," but, based on the reference to even Germans being surprised it's a last name, now I'm thinking maybe "Guja" or another surname that technically has a non-Germanic origin but has been "domesticated" into German usage.
I had somehow been unaware until this instant that Jindal has a kid who shares a name with Deathstroke: The Terminator ("Slade").
I think that a lot of it is just phonology? The Japanese/Chinese comparison is illustrative here. Almost all of the phonemes in Japanese appear in English (and the missing one can be reasonably approximated with an “r”), so English-speakers who make a good-faith effort can learn to pronounce Japanese names pretty quickly. Chinese phonology has features like the “four tones” which English speakers aren’t able to differentiate or correctly pronounce without special training and practice, so most English speakers will atrociously mangle Chinese names.
Even without the tones you're still mangling it, trust me.
Oh, I know.
That's some of it but feels like an incomplete explanation, hence my ongoing wonder about the issue.
I know people named Minh ("men"), Duyen ("you-en"), Hieu ("hue"), Phi ("fee"), Mai ("my"), My ("me"), Vy ("v"), Cun ("coon"), Ha ("ha") ... all of which are easy for a foreigner to pronounce 90% accurately. But they all pick English names when dealing with foreigners. Remember this is in Vietnam. These are names that are basically only ever used at work with foreigners.
As I said below, while those syllables can be pronounced, *none* of those romanizations make sense for anyone who doesn't already know how to read them and very, very few would get them right on the first try.
I didn't even know Duyen, lol, and Cun is pronounced completely differently in Mandarin, though the rest are reasonably close to Mandarin.
> I didn't even know Duyen
Yeah thank the Portuguese missionaries for that one. They decided to romanize the "y" sound with D and the "d" sound with Đ.....
I think some of this is a legacy of how the romanization was done... I agree those are easy to pronounce, but not for tourists trying to sound out the spelling?
My ethnically Vietnamese friend Nhat-Dang just goes by Dang (pronounced like dangit). So that's another approach.
My uncles Antonio and Giuseppe go by “Tony” and “Joe,” respectively. Perhaps a little different because these are translations of their Italian names, not invented nicknames.
In fairness to those of Vietnamese descent living in the States, I can't wrap my mouth around many phonemes despite speaking a language which is somewhat related. In fact I think speaking Mandarin made my ability to pronounce Vietnamese worse.
I am not surprised that most East and Southeast Asian parents here opt for Americanized names or nicknames, given how often they've likely heard their own names butchered and how sick they are of trying to have it fixed.
As for citizenship, I don't even think a Chinese national ID card can be printed with anything except characters, as well, so I imagine that China's rules on that are the same.
"I can't wrap my mouth around many phonemes despite speaking a language which is somewhat related. In fact I think speaking Mandarin made my ability to pronounce Vietnamese worse."
FWIW, Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language and Mandarin a Sino-Tibetan one. That is: linguists cannot find a common ancestor for these two languages, even when they search as far back as possible. Vietnamese does have a large number of loanwords from Middle Chinese, but loanwords often see pronunciation shifts to match local phonology anyways.
But there are sometimes areal effects by which neighboring languages develop similar phonology, despite being unrelated. Famously, India has this, with both the Dravidian and indo-European languages getting the b/bh/p/ph series (and parallel ones, including retroflex). I don’t know whether or not similar things happened in southeast and east Asia.
Sprachbund!
I live in Vietnam, so I wasn't really talking about immigrants, though I guess given the context of Milan's post I can see why all the American commenters are going in that direction.
If you go into any hotel near the main tourist areas of Saigon or Hanoi every single staff will have a name tag saying "Iris" or "Ruth" instead of their actual name.
That's more the kind of dynamic I was originally referring to
I understood, yea. I think the same set of rationales applies. Your Romanization makes fuck-all sense to someone who speaks a language which uses a Latin alphabet natively, and therefore the chances of a foreigner who doesn't have any knowledge of Vietnamese getting names right is basically nil. Bahasa and Hindi romanizations are just much more intelligible to Europeans and Americans.
The same is true in Mandarin; folks in service jobs where they deal with foreign tourists basically all have an "English name" they use, because otherwise they're not even going to recognize when someone is calling for their attention because of the butchery their name will be subjected to.
It can be a little awkward when you meet a Vietnamese guy named Phuc. (I know it's not pronounced that way.)
My pronunciation of Vietnamese names and words was helped a lot when the light went off over my head that the transliteration system for Vietnamese to the Latin alphabet was done by French-speakers.
Japanese-Americans adopt Anglo names. My grandma Hatsuko became Connie, my grandpa Abo became John, and they named their children Nancy, Tammy and Michael. It’s a result of the forced assimilation that came from the internments.
In fact, it’s usually easy to tell if a Japanese-American’s family came over before of after WWII based on whether they have a Japanese name.
Huh that’s funny, it’s different in my family. The generation that went to the camps all kept their Japanese names. They did all give their kids Anglo names though.
I’ve wondered about this but in a slightly different way - I find it interesting which ethnic groups “assimilate” their names in America and which ones don’t. My sense is that most East Asian parents who have kids in the US give them “English” names. Same with southern Europeans (eg most people with Italian last names are not named Giuseppe and most people of Greek descent aren’t Ioannis) and Jews and Armenians. My sense is Latinos are starting to shift this way as well.
Yet most south Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Muslim Arabs, etc) seem to give their kids ethnic names - even those who have been in the US for a long time. You don’t see a lot of Craig Patels walking around.
I’m curious why this is - it seems maladaptive, for lack of a better term, and like a potential hindrance to success. Of course there are lots of reasons to choose a name, but I wonder if Milan would have felt like less of an outsider growing up if his name had just been “Dylan”
I don’t think I would. I don’t want to be a Dylan. Who would I be fooling? When people see me walking down the street they don’t see a Dylan. I’m making my peace with that.
The purpose of choosing Anglo names isn't necessarily to "fool" anyone, but to simplify interactions in an English-speaking society.
Fair and thanks for the response! Though I still think there’s a lot of value in having people know how to pronounce your name correctly.
If you were to see someone who looks like yourself walking down the street - who would you see? If they said their name was Dylan, would you be offended, disappointed, happy, ambivalent, apathetic?
I find this fascinating because I totally get not wanting to be Dylan because you're Milan - its who you are!. Just like I wouldn't want to be Milan because I'm John. Having a different name would make me someone else. I like being who I am and expect you feel the same about being Milan. But the idea that taking a name is somehow "fooling someone" or someone else wouldn't "see a Dylan" is so contrary to how I think that its surprising/shocking to see you write it.
Did your family ever talk about how your name would be pronounced 'Milon' in Bengali? Even within India, there's so much variance. For example, my daughter's name starts with an 'S' which is a sound that doesn't exist in Bangla. My grandmother would've pronounced it as starting with 'Sh'.
On the other hand, you do see some “Colin Chaudhuri” and “Kenny Easwaran” types if you hang around the dark corners of the internet.
I’ll admit that the “Kenny” and the neutral skin tone of your photo kept me from seeing your surname as Asian until you identified your ethnicity.
Haha I never said there were none! It was interesting reading Colin’s comment with the story behind his name - I’m just surprised more parents don’t think the same way.
I think it’s because we use the English alphabet regularly. I’m differentiating that from “Latin” alphabet. I’ve met french Indians who have “French-y” names.
So many kids in India don’t know how to write their own name in their mother tongue. I still can’t pick a spelling in Devanagari Hindi, but I am confident with my name in English.
It’s this unique effect of The British not being zealous with proselytization (unlike the Spanish), and using English, that will have it so Indians can use their ethnic names. We can’t have names from the Christian bible because many of us are not Christian.
That’s interesting, but doesn’t feel like it addresses why Indian parents in the US give their kids “foreign sounding” names instead of “American sounding” names.
Like even your last point makes my point. Why can’t you have a name from the Christian bible (whatever that means?) - lots of Jewish people and East Asian (non-Christian) people have English names that you’d probably say are “Christian”. It seems like South Asians are uniquely reluctant to use “typical” American names. I find that somewhat surprising.
Hey hey now - those biblical names are Jewish all the way through!
But it does seem common to choose a name that straddles both cultures - Sonia, Rena, and Sara are common all across the Middle East and South Asia, for example.
I mean I’m a Jewish guy named Andrew so I do have a bit of first hand experience! It derives from Greek and apparently it was common among Hellenized Jews in the time of Jesus, but it’s definitely not a “Jewish” name. That’s probably true of most of the names of early Christians.
You functionally can’t go by most Chinese names in the US (people will throw darts at barely-phonetically-adjacent walls). But the romanization->phonetic pronunciation of Indian names is usually ~okay.
I think we are dancing around an obvious contributor - religion is at least part of the answer. Would be interesting to see if Christian Indians are more likely to give their children anglicanized names vs Hindu/Sikh/Muslim parents. Immigrants leave their country behind, but take their religious beliefs with them.
I’m sure that’s part of it, but then explain Jews giving their kids names like [checks notes] Andrew?
Well, that's a Greek name, not an overtly Christian one.
Although really, there are very few inherently Christian names, other than maybe Christopher / Christina.
In extremely diverse India, name are signifier you about your religion, language, ethnicity, your caste (or opposition to it), or even village. There are tons of Indians who have Christian names, and it is a signifier back home. Dylan is a common name in Kerala.
It is maladaptive and you get upset with your parents about it when you’re young. I think part of it is pride and naming convention.
Again I’m sure that’s true in *India*.
Once you’re not in India, why does this matter?
Or to paraphrase another commenter - most immigrants leave their country behind and give their kids Anglicized names in America. Indians, for whatever reason, largely don’t. From the outside in, this seems strange.
Some cultures value names more than others, when deciding what to drop when they immigrate? My hunch above is for why names matter. I also think Indians are, compared to East Asians, uniquely used to culturally diverse societies back home - so maybe they feel less of a 'push' when they immigrate elsewhere?
Also, lot of Japanese Americans had Japanese first names prior to WW2. Some Eastern Europeans name their kid Vlad or Anastasia. Some names also become less ethnic over time like Jonah, Ruth, or Hannah. Some seem to be coded as ethnic again, like Oscar. So not sure that its fully unique but I grant that the level of doing so may be unique.
China has a well-ingrained cultural tradition of people having different names in different cultural contexts, and Chinese speakers in English-influenced places in Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) quite frequently have english names alongside their Chinese nanes. So I don't think that it has too much to do with assimilating to western culture particularly.
I think it's pretty likely that Antonio would go by Tony. And that nickname almost sounds Italian due to so many of his predecessor Antonios doing the same thing (though it's not, as Mr. Blair demonstrates).
The Milan Era is over. Good luck on your new gig!
Hope the two of you still have some time to talk weightlifting in the future!
I got him on twitter. And we have a date to hit the gym next time I am working near him.
And while I can't imagine him having an opportunity to visit Boise any time soon, if he did we definitely owe him a toast and a round to treat him right here.
Any of you are welcome to join me at Trinity on February 15th next year
Ignorant question: what is Trinity?
Bar
"The moderator is dead! Long live the moderator"?
One day I asked Milan if there could be a guinea pig appreciation post on guinea pig appreciation day, which is also my girlfriends birthday (who loves guinea pigs), and on July 16 Milan actually put up a photo of a couple of guinea pigs, calling them magnificent clunkers.
You will be missed, thank you for the emotions and good luck for the future!
Thanks for your two years of service to Slow Boring, and thanks for writing this essay.
It never occurred to me to think of "Bobby" as a daak naam. Thanks for showing me that. I agree with you that it's weird for him to use it in public. But I've always found it gross when people who are generally aligned with me ideologically conspicuously call Jindal "Piyush" to other him.
Same for Nikki, do I like the fact she changed her name? No. But by calling her her first name you’re trying to “other” her so hard.
I personally wouldn't consider what Haley did with regard to her given name to even be changing it -- there's a long history of Anglo-American politicians using their middle names or nicknames professionally. See, e.g., Willard Mitt Romney, John Ellis Bush ("JEB"), etc. (This article on the subject of politicians going by non-birth names cites research that people are perceived as more likeable when their names are easily pronouncible, BTW: https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/01/politics-candidates-names/13459183/ )
Yeppp that would be true but she did convert (which is kind of a big deal for Hindus) and she did marry a white guy (again, not a big deal for me, but some idiots view that as “race traitorship” or whatever).
Weirdest part is Nikki has always been an Indian American staple, I remember the old song “Neil and Nikki” which was on my ipod that I got from a cousin.
But Obama went back to Barack from Barry
Barack sounds more serious than Barry. Imagine “Prof. Barack Obama” versus “Prof. Barry Obama.” It’s also not phonologically or orthographically confusing.
“Vote for Vivek” works better than “Vote for Klobuchar,” as well.
That’s interesting that “Bobby” is a daak naam! I had been familiar with the concept of there being a different name members of your family use than others (which always confused me since my aunts and uncles and cousins all had that) but I didn’t know the term.
This is a lovely piece and I'll be sorry to see you go, but wish you success in your next venture!
It's funny that you mention Nikki Haley towards the end. I've been seeing some pieces written by liberals that will refer to her as "Nimrata" and it always reminds me of when republicans would emphasize "Barack HUSSEIN Obama". In both cases, they are the person's actual name, and I do understand that feeling that someone is trying to be someone or something that they are not. But to me these examples illustrate how important it is to just accept what someone wants to be called. Just imagine someone introducing himself as "Matt" in the office and shouting "Your name is MATTHEW and don't you forget it!" or something ridiculous like that.
Only one’s mother gets to do that.
Amen to that!
Yeah, I also think that the people who want to deadname Nikki Haley are being dumb. She’s an adult woman who can use whatever name she wants.
In honor of this post, can we get a SB demographics survey? I have some hunches that’d I’d love to test