Eric Chan 陳志宇 진지유
My three names are Eric Chan, 陳志宇, and 진지유. My legal name and first language is American English. My surname, generation name, and given name are Hong Kong Cantonese from our Yeh-Yeh 爺爺 (paternal grandfather), and my Korean name is a 漢字 – 한글 transliteration from our oe-harabeoji 외할아버지 (maternal grandfather).
As a child, I struggled to reconcile the regional dialects I heard at home with the standard, mainland languages I reluctantly studied in textbooks and classrooms on weekends in churches. I try to practice speaking more of both as an adult, but have never gotten comfortable or fluent enough in any version of Chinese or Korean. So my names are mostly written (族譜) and rarely spoken among friends and family. But this is already true in Asian communities. We often rather refer to one another not by name, but by relationship or seniority (哥弟姐妹, 오빠, 형, 누나, 언니, 막내).
I must also remind myself that the folk arts I practice are traditionally performed and passed down anonymously, so we need not hold any of our names as sacred, precious, or permanent.
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