My name is
James Yoo. That’s what my friends know me as and call me. Various legal documents know me as Jun Sung Yoo, and somewhere in a database in some lonely data center owned by the government of the Republic of Korea I’ll probably be known as 유준성.
Some time last week, I got a notification from the BC government to book my first dose for the COVID-19 vaccine. When I got that text, I practically leapt out of my chair and logged on to the booking link, or, tried to. It turns out that somehow, the software used by the government to register people for vaccination has parsed my legal name (Jun Sung Yoo) into something of the form below:
- First name: Jun
- Middle name: Sung
- Last name: Yoo
After a brief phone call with the help line, I was able to log on successfully, using the name “Jun Yoo” and book a vaccination for May 18th. I was incredibly happy to finally get concrete evidence of some form of an end to the pandemic. That said, the issue with the naming system reminded me of something that I hadn’t thought about for a while.
I never liked my “legal” name, or as some would call it, my Korean name. I’ve entertained the possibility of legally changing my name to James Yoo, but I’ve never really taken the plunge. It turns out that it’s an expensive process, since I’d have to effectively replace every single piece of government ID I have, update banking information, and a laundry list of other things. I don’t like my legal name not because I harbour any animosity toward my birthplace, but because I identify more with James than Jun Sung.
Of course, there are a million other James’es out there in the world, but our names are basically the first notion of self that we actually encounter in our lives. Maybe it’s because I’ve actually lived more of my life being known as “James” instead of “Jun Sung,” being given an “English” name when our family moved here when I was 6. A few memories that stand out to me were the various first days of school, when my new homeroom teacher would struggle to pronounce my legal name. I’d waste no time making sure that I’d rather be called “James.”
Recently, more people have begun to embrace their legal names, especially in their online presence. The wave of anti-Asian sentiment have often led individuals of Asian descent to reaffirm and be proud of their identity. Some people I know have actually changed their online names to reflect their legal names. I am not part of this community, and this does make me wonder if I’m doing a disservice to my community. But that raises another question: if I don’t feel like I identify with this particular community, would any effort to show support be genuine? I don’t particularly feel strongly about my roots as a Korean-Canadian, and if I’m being completely honest, I feel more at-ease with Canadian culture as a whole than Korean culture.
So what now? I’m definitely not going to go and start a request to change my legal name, but I wonder if that’s going to be something I’ll pursue in the future. Maybe I’ll go the route that some of my friends have and use my ethnic name as my middle name. I could also just omit having my ethnic name as part of my legal name at all, like others I know. All I know is, unless I’m signing a legal document, my name is James.