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[quote=Anonymous]I have a “foreign” name. My parents gave me an American nickname that’s similar to my real name, which I still go by today.

Even though my last name is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled in English, and is pronounced exactly like a very famous celebrity’s except that the first letter is different, 60% of people get it wrong. (The other 40 are like, “Why? It’s pronounced exactly as it’s spelled”). The only way you would not know this household name is if you live in a community that doesn’t acknowledge televisions or Hollywood, or if you are under 25 and moved to the US last year.

If preceded by my real first name, sometimes both names simply get mispronounced. Sometimes letters get scrambled. The best is when random syllables or consonants somehow get dropped in. Some people seem to temporarily lose the ability to sound things out one syllable at a time, phonics-style. Circuits fry. Eyes glaze over. They’ve just given up by the time they get to my last name, or they actually say some iteration of my first name (both names are under six letters. They share two vowels that occur only once each.)

When I was a kid and other kids would say stuff, it was good to have “yeah that’s why I go by X” as a response to fall back on. During roll calls I learned to just raise my hand when the awkward pause happened. And I could always see the relief when I said “you can call me X”

My name doesn’t get misspelled on written correspondence too often, probably because it is really not that hard. I do get misgendered. My findability online is scattered since I don’t always have control over which name gets posted. So a bad picture from 15 years ago might be the first search result.

It pisses me off when Americans insist on calling me by (a still butchered version of) my real first name because “it’s cute! You should embrace it!” So condescending and presumptuous. I have a very strong connection to my home country, so I go by my non-American name when I’m there. [/quote]

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