Minority Names

When you live in a place like California, you meet a lot of people with non-English names. Most of these are Spanish, but there are many Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and other Asian names as well. Because English doesn't have anything like katakana, there's no way to tell immediately that a name is "foreign". I didn't really know why some of my friends were Santos and some were Iyengar until I was in junior high school, when I first learned about racism and discrimination.

Looking back, I can see some trends among the names of the minority groups the kids in my classes came from.

Korean kids often had Biblical names, like Eunice, Grace, John or Paul.

Indian kids usually had Indian names, like Vijay, Raaj, Preeti, or Purnima.

All the Chinese kids I knew had very English-sounding names they used in school, which were sometimes the names on their birth certificates, sometimes the closest English equivalent to their original Chinese name, and sometimes totally different. For example, a kid whose legal name was "Yenxia" might be called "Angie" (which sounds similar), or might be called "Rose" (which sounds totally different). No one, however, was called "Yenxia" at school. I guess they thought their classmates couldn't pronounce the original Chinese.

The Japanese kids all had English-sounding first names and Japanese middle names, like Robert Taro Taniguchi or Michelle Aiko Kitamura.

The Vietnamese kids usually had Vietnamese names, which unfortunately sound a bit strange to the other kids sometimes.

Of course, all the kids were American citizens too.