Sitting in the kitchen and kicking my feet in the high chair, I was taught from a young age about my Chinese name: 若夏. Its literal meaning is “like the summer.” My family gave me the name with the hope that I would always embody the bright energy of summer.
But by the time I learned how to say my name in Chinese, I had already been assigned another one.
In preschool, my English teacher — an American woman — filled out a quarterly personal evaluation for me to take home. My parents crowded over the sheet of paper, buzzing. It turned out she had deemed the romanized version of my Chinese name, “Ruosia,” unusable in an English classroom setting.
“You need to provide her with a proper English name, or it will be hard for her to participate in class,” she wrote. “For now, I will call her Rosa.”
A couple of years ago, I dug through the folder where my parents keep my old school documents and found the evaluation sheet again. Looking back at it — along with a couple of others, in which this teacher continued the evaluations with my “new name” — I felt an immediate sense of disgust.
Who was she to lecture a child’s family for not naming her in English when they had no reason to? Why not use her legal name, the original form of her name in her mother tongue? Even a romanized version of one’s ethnic name wasn’t enough; it had to be anglicized so it was “actually” English.
Thankfully, my parents realized that my teacher’s decision to name me was a massive overstep. My father sat me down and presented a few other “R” names, in hopes of preserving the sound of my Chinese name.
I don’t know how “Rochelle” made it into the lineup, but it stuck out to me instantly and I showed my interest. It turned out to be an almost perfect phonetic echo of “Ruosia,” but retained none of Ruosia’s meaning. A Google search revealed that “Rochelle” means “little rock” in French.
Of course, what that teacher did would be considered unethical and problematic today — especially in a place like the United States, a melting pot of cultures — but it was sadly far more normalized in China. Nevertheless, it is unjust to erase a student’s ethnic roots and forcibly anglicize their name. This act resonates with broader, more violent histories of erasing cultural identities. During British colonial rule of India, British officials, in order to get around “difficult” Indian names, would shorten, simplify or alter them altogether. This is undeniably wrong.
Ironically, this turned out to be a lose-lose situation. Not only was I pressured to choose an English name for myself, I would also receive odd comments for having one.
When I started college, I realized that I was registered under my legal name in all the administrative systems, but I still decided to go by “Rochelle” in everyday conversation. Having utilized it for practically all my life by then, it felt more than natural to introduce myself this way.
During my first year, in a conversation with a student who had kept their original Chinese name, I was met with an unexpected edge of hostility. “Why did you change your name anyway? Is your Chinese name too embarrassing for you?” she scoffed, brushing it off as a joke.
I was taken aback. I wasn’t ashamed of my ethnicity, but in that moment, I became aware of how easily it could be read that way.
Afterward, I became increasingly aware of how I used my names. In my first year, I asked my dorm RC to change the name tag on my door to my English name, but this year, I kept my Chinese name. I started signing emails with it, feeling ashamed of the impulse to include my English name in everything.
What I’ve just begun to realize is that this was the other end of the spectrum of name-policing. My embarrassment at using my English name was a consequence of another form of judgment. Instead of questioning the system that made these choices necessary in the first place, why are we so quick to question the people navigating it?
Names are treated as markers of authenticity, but it seems that authenticity itself is constantly policed. Some people are punished for refusing to change their names, while others are judged for changing them.
And this instinct is not limited to language or ethnicity. Across very different contexts, we see the same pattern. Transgender people, for example, are often asked to defend the names they have chosen for themselves — names that may be deeply tied to their own senses of survival and self-recognition. The questions forced on them are similar: rarely simply ‘what is your name,’ but rather ‘why should I accept it?’
Who gets to change their name without being questioned, and who gets scrutinized no matter what they choose? When people ask for your name, they want it to be legible to them. The debate over names seems to often miss the point: It’s not about whether keeping an “original” name is more authentic or whether changing it is a form of loss. There is no correct choice, only different kinds of scrutiny, applied unevenly depending on who you are and who is listening.
Today, although “Rochelle” is a name four-year-old me chose on a whim in response to pressure from an instructor, it means a lot to me due to how long I’ve had it. Despite the lack of a “real” meaning on its own, it is important to remember that it is a transliteration of 若夏, which carries the true meaning of the name I was given at birth — to be bright, fiery and incandescent.
“The double standards imposed upon those with multiple names expose the flaws of a system that demands coherence in a world where we are each uniquely multifaceted.”
The expectation that a single name can fully capture who someone is inherently flawed. Identity is not singular, and for those of us shaped by multiple cultures, it was never meant to be. The double standards imposed upon those with multiple names expose the flaws of a system that demands coherence in a world where we are each uniquely multifaceted.
After reflecting on eighteen years of being called Rochelle and a lifetime of being called 若夏, I can finally view my names, and by extension my identities, as something I’m able to reconcile while remaining whole.
Ruosia (Rochelle) Lu SC ’28 is from Shanghai, China and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In honor of linguistic diversity on campus, she hopes you will submit to the first issue of Graft — the Multilingual Review of Claremont.
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