What's in a name?

Lately, I've been contemplating my name.

When I was a kid, I got made fun of. I got lots of Shoe jokes. There was a brand of shoes at the local mall called Connie and it was perfect fodder for a whole onslaught of Shoe jokes. Some kids got creative and thought up variations on that, like Connie Sock or Connie Boot or Connie whatever. After awhile I didn't care. I tried to use it to my advantage. When I ran for Junior Class President in high school, my friend designed a campaign tag that was shaped like a shoe and said "Connie for Prez" on it or something. They were super cute (I think they were designed to look like Converse shoes, which were in at the time and incidentally in right now) and I won that election.

I thought things would only get better when I got married and had the opportunity to change my name to something easier to spell, know how to pronounce, or not make fun of. But the other thing I used to get called when I was a kid was Connie Chung. As in the the first major Asian American news anchor who is married to Maury Povich. Little did I know that I would marry into a name that was so similar to this one. In fact, after two years I'm still not used to it. When I hear people call me Connie Chun I often think they are mocking me. In fact, I gave the guy who changed my oil the other day a dirty look when he said, "Connie Chun? Your car is ready." And when I hear them call me "Mrs. Chun" I often look around for Paul's mom.

Well, when we got our marriage certificate I remember the moment when I fiilled out the form and wrote that I intended to change my surname. Paul looked at me sympathetically and asked, "Are you sure? You don't have to." I responded that I wanted to, and that I wanted our names to symbolically reflect that we were becoming one family and I wanted our kids to have the same last name as both of us. At the time, I worked in a school where there were a lot kids whose moms had decided to keep their maiden names and I guess the traditionalist in me wanted it to be different than the kids whose last names were different from their mom's or who had hyphenated last names. But I also felt bound by a sort of duty or desire to partake in this rite of passage of for a married woman to change her name, though I later discovered what a pain it was (and still is) to fulfill this process. After this process, the feminist in me has often been bitter that this is still an understood social norm in our society for the woman to go through all that trouble and confusion. I mean, why can't we just decide based on which name sounds better for both people? I think Paul Sheu is pretty good.

So our solution was for me to keep my maiden name as my "artist name" as Paul calls it, and to use my legal last name (now Chun) for other circumstances, which was nice when we moved to a new place and people didn't get confused that we were married, and they know us lovingly as "the Chuns." I think that's kind of fun. It means to me that we are our own household and family, a concept that we spent a lot of time contemplating during our engagement. And I also get to write "Paul and Connie Chun" on things like address labels, Christmas cards, bills and such. That's kind of fun too, I suppose.

Well, now that I am in school again and most of my professors know my last name to be Chun, since that's what I put on my application and that's what they have on their roll. But the guitar faculty all know me by my "artist name" and it sort of feels like I have two identities. Part of it makes me feel special, a little bit like having an alter ego or being a superhero. But on the other hand, it is just plain confusing. So sometimes I resort to putting my full legal name down on papers, and in my email too, and for people not familiar with either name sometimes they get the vowels and syllables mixed up so that it becomes "Connie Shun Choo" or something stupid like that. And you would be surprised at the amount of people that pronounce a name like Chun to be "chooon." Because "fun" and "run" aren't good enough examples of a short U sound? Add on the mixed up consonants I become Connie Chu Shooon. I mean, come on people!

I thought seriously about hyphenating recently, and going through all the trouble of changing my name to something that would help people understand that it is a married name and to just simplify things and just use both all the time. This was because I recently got a teaching job in which the administration put "Shu-Chun" down as my last name. They apparently assumed that it was hyphenated (though they didn't spell it all correctly, but I'm used to that), though I never indicated anything of the sort. But then hyphenating wouldn't really help with the pronunciation, though it might aid in the confusion of knowing which name to use. However, one syllable Asian last names don't really sound that good hyphenated. I think that more than one Asian sounding last name for one person may be too much for the American general public at large. Paul told me he was sorry that he's not a Kennedy. Ooh, I thought to myself. Now there's a name I would have been ecstatic about. But alas, I shall remain Connie Chu Shun for the rest of my life.