They said that I should be proud of who I was, and they weren’t wrong, but they were so angry about it that I knew I should keep my worries to myself. But my parents refused to let me change my name. I have always envied Asian kids whose parents let them change their names or have separate “American” names. “You know what your name looks like, right? Did your parents really name you that?” “How do you spell that?” Sometimes they would laugh in my face. A name like Bich (pronounced “Bic”) didn’t just make me stand out-it made me miserably visible. When my family named me, they didn’t know that we would become refugees eight months later and that I would grow up in Michigan in the nineteen-eighties, in the conservative, mostly white, west side of the state, where girls had names like Jennifer, Amy, and Stacy. Some insisted that they liked it: Bich, a Vietnamese name, given to me in Saigon, where I was born and where the name is quite ordinary. People have always told me not to change my name.
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