Name Story

I was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. My birthname is Khaisa Ikhsannya Adzani. I changed my name when I was 19 years old. I made the decision myself to change it because Pintak is my dad’s last name. He’s my stepfather but he’s my “dad.” Everyone always knew me as “Annya”―that was my nickname. I moved to the U.S. when I was 10 years old to a very small, predominantly White town where everyone had traditional American names. I remember feeling embarrassed by something as simple as putting your name in a standardized test box, being ashamed that my name was so long. It didn’t fit and I think I just wanted to be like everybody else so that I didn’t seem so different and foreign.

My memory is a little bit jumbled but my mother had me at a young age and I think she went to find herself, get herself out of maybe a not good situation. I ended up living with my grandparents and my aunt. In Javanese culture, it’s important and normal to be close and involved with extended families. My first memory of my mom was probably around the age of 7 or 8 and seeing her again after a very long time. She was already married to my dad―he’s American, he’s White. I remember meeting her and him together and I think I was very confused. Pretty quickly after that, they had my siblings. It was only my nuclear family that moved from Indonesia to the U.S. and because our new lives was without my extended family, it felt very hard to be so far away.

My siblings are half Indonesian, half White and I was told by my parents to not really tell my siblings that I was their half sibling. Growing up, I have memories of being in the car and my sister being like, “Are you sure Annya wasn’t adopted? Her nose looks a little different.” Even as kids, you’re seeing visual differences in your own family unit and it was this big secret that I was expected to keep. It was really hard and confusing because I had to play the part of being half White. My siblings are much lighter and because I had the family secret, it was really hard to be the darker one. I couldn’t help but think it would be so much easier if I was lighter skinned and I was White passing. And being the only brown kid in class, I had moments where I was feeling kind of ashamed being darker skinned. I think at 19, I just wanted to legally change my name to make it just easy for everybody and myself. Also, I’m very grateful for the relationship that I have with my dad and my siblings have his last name and wanting to be truly a part of that unit legally in a name. I don’t regret it necessarily but I do wonder if I made the decision too fast. I’m really now in a process of knowing what are ways that I can reclaim that name back. I don’t want to be ashamed of my birth name. I also don’t want to be ashamed of the fact that I changed my name. It’s a big part of my story, a big part of who I am.

I was adopted from Korea and so my birthmother gave me my first and middle name, “Annah Kim” or “Kim, Annah.” I was adopted into the U.S. when I was 6 months old. The adoption agency said, “You should keep a portion of her Korean heritage in her life for the rest of her life” so they kept that name. My last name is Nelson-Feeney. Nelson is from my mom and Feeney is from my dad. They both adopted me. When I was 3, they divorced. It was a long history of abuse that my mom had suffered with my father but she had, due to her own reasons, wanted to stay in the marriage. He had been having an affair with one of his clients and so he left us on Christmas Eve to go with his new family. He also had pretty severe bipolar disorder so I’ve never really had much of a relationship with him.

I grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts which was a very White place. My mom always told me that I was adopted. We lived with my aunt and uncle and my cousin Jonas, who’s adopted from Peru. I didn’t really see myself as being Korean for a while. In high school I had the “Fasian” or “fake Asian” nickname, and I owned that, and then I went to college and didn’t have any Korean friends. Then over time, I started to make more Korean friends and they were what I’d call the “weird Koreans,” the ones that don’t fit the mold. So they’re already not judging you based on these preconceived notions of what it means to be Korean and what it means to be Korean American, which I feel like there’s a hierarchy for Asian Americans in terms of how “Asian” you are being an American. So I really didn’t ever feel that close to being Korean just because I was rejected by almost all of them. I didn’t even know that POC meant “Person of Color” until I moved to Seattle. I didn’t really have the language to talk about it so when I heard that term, I’m like, I’m going to own this. I’m just a Person of Color. That’s vague enough for me. That’s a home that I can reside in that has big enough walls―I’ll never hit the outside. And then very recently, I decided that now I’m Korean. It’s for me. It’s not for anyone else. I don’t need to prove it to anyone. And I think that was really cemented when I went to Korea and it just felt easy.

Each part of my name has a pretty significant gravity to it. “Annah Kim,” my Korean birth name implicates a lot of trauma, being abandoned, adopted, and so forth―all the race pieces kind of tied into that. My mom obviously means a lot to me and so the “Nelson” piece would never go away. I actually would never drop the “Feeney” part either. All the things that’s he’s done to my mother or to myself over the years just made me who I am today. It’s made me a stronger person, it’s given me a deeper appreciation for mental health and awareness…that’s just a big portion or my life and who I am. All these pieces create a kind of a hodgepodge of things and I absolutely love my name.

I was born in Manila, Philippines. I was 3 years old when my family immigrated. I come from a family of six children. We had the three that had lighter skin and the three that had darker skin. The three who had darker skin were my two brothers and myself and really, with our culture, darker skin is considered not as good as lighter skin. My mom would say that it’s not that bad for boys to have darker skin, which means it’s bad for girls. That’s something that I always knew for a long time. I thought it was just my family that believed that, or Filipinos.

When I was 8 years old, my family moved from South Seattle, which was a really diverse neighborhood, to the Eastside to Kirkland. The new school I went to, I was the only non-white child. It was in the middle of the school year so it was really hard―definitely felt like I didn’t belong, didn’t fit in. One of the things that this new school had that my old school didn’t was specialist day and we had art one day. It was the first time I got to paint with paint brushes on an easel and I was super excited. I did my whole thing, had a great time, and was just a total mess after and had gotten paint all over my hands. And I remember turning to the boy next to me and saying something like “I’ll have to go wash my hands, they’re all dirty,” and he said to me, “Your skin always looks like dirt, it doesn’t matter if you wash your hands.” So though my mom had told me, “don’t let your skin get any darker,” that was the first time that I realized everyone thinks brown skin looks like dirt. I just remember feeling like I was ugly and I would always be ugly. And it really doesn’t matter when people tell you you’re pretty if when you’re 8 years old, you’ve accepted that you’re ugly. I’ve tried to tell myself that it’s not true, and sometimes believe that’s not true but I go back to that.

I got to be really aware of noticing all of the differences, all the things that weren’t ideal. I didn’t want to be who I was. I’ve only dated White guys so I knew I would marry someone White and I wanted to make sure my children had lighter skin than me. Growing up I thought, “I’m not going to take my husband’s last name,” but I definitely did and one of the reasons is that he has a very American last name. Even after getting divorced, I kept that last name. I liked my identity, at least my name didn’t sound Asian or Filipinio. What it has meant for me to change my last name back to my birth surname really has meant this kind of autonomy, an independence and starting that journey of accepting who I am, who I was when I was born, my heritage, where I came from. And the irony is, if you think about autonomy and where I came from, being Filipino means that you have a heritage of colonization and not being autonomous and free. I have a Spanish based last name now. What was a Filipino last name 500 going on 600 years ago? I don’t even know.

My name is Rya and I was born here in Seattle. I changed my name in 2021. It started with the name Ryan and eventually I dropped the “n” and I was like, that feels like me. The name means dream or free-flowing river and it’s based off of the Greek name “Rhea.” I love my name Rya. It feels very affirming. My given name from my parents was Tiffany. My parents had picked the name because they said they wanted a name that my grandma could pronounce, which is funny because in Taiwanese they don’t even have the “f” sound. When I had the name Tiffany, I honestly hated it. Even saying it now I get this creepy, crawly feeilng on my back I don’t like. I feel like I’ve been conflicted with my name my whole life. I think the name Tiffany a) never fit me, and b) carried and carries so much of my past trauma and the life that maybe was chosen for me rather than with me in mind. It was what my parents wanted for themselves so it just doesn’t feel like mine.

When I think of the name Tiffany, I think of that time when I was 14 years old and my parents were in the middle of a divorce. My brother, who is 5 years younger, was really struggling a lot and I was definitely like a surrogate mother or pseudo mother to him. My mom also was fighting breast cancer. Honestly at 14, I was a kid―14 is not terribly old and so to be responsible for my brother and basically my parents separated so then I had to fill in for my dad. I was in charge of making all the executive decisions for the household and paying the bills, finances, and household stuff. It was a really hard time and I felt like I needed support that I didn’t have, while needing to be the support for other people. I never really got a chance to be a kid, always having to be the adult in the house, even before my parents’ divorce. When I’ve asked my parents why they had me, the answer is always along the lines of “your mother was ill and we thought that she could use a little helper.” So I’ve sort of just walked around carrying the story of “I exist purely to serve my mother. I exist purely to help her and make her life easier and my life is not my own.” It was just like one of the hardest points of my life and all of that is very much embedded in the name Tiffany for me.

I selected this photo because I really wanted her to be seen and I think she really deserves to be seen. She did a lot for everyone even when she didn’t have much to give. I remember one day I had talked to my mom and I was like, “Hey mom, sometimes I feel like, I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t exist and I don’t know what would happen if I disappeared,” and my mom was like, “Oh, everyone thinks about that.” And I think she was trying to normalize it, but it just felt really dismissive and so I think during that time, I just felt really invisible and I just feel a lot of sadness, grief. I carry her with me.

Being born in South Korea as a Chinese person…there is a Chinese minority group there that my family was part of since the 1940s. It was a very difficult country to live in because they were ostracized and segregated from the rest of Korean society and we were not given any kind of citizenship. When we moved to the U.S., I was 6 years old and we actually didn’t even have Chinese or Korean passports. Our passports were Taiwanese even though we never even stepped foot there because we were people with no country. Taiwan was taking on citizens from people who fled overseas from China, from whoever needed residency. Our passports are all written in Chinese and so when we moved to the U.S., we had to go through this green card person and they had to translate our Chinese names into English. My name should have been “Zhen Yi” but instead, they wrote it as “Chun I” so that became immortalized as my name forever. I deeply dislike my legal name. I cringe and it gives me a visceral response deep inside that I can’t seem to shake. It felt very representative of everything that was wrong with people’s understanding of Chinese names and the seriousness that they took in translating my name. Trying to change it, at this point, feels too overwhelming so I haven’t even considered going through that process yet.

A month after we moved to the U.S., my parents decided to move us all to Georgia. When I started school that fall, my mother was talking to a neighbor of ours and she asked, “What’s going to be her name at school?” My mom said, “That’s obvious. Zhen Yi.” And the neighbor says, “You can’t possibly name her that because she’s never going to fit in.” So my mother asked what my name should be because not really speaking English, there’s no way that my parents could have come up with a name. My neighbor thought, why not “Jeannie?” As old as I am, I should have, at this point, really enmeshed myself with that name and I haven’t. I just don’t identify with it. I’ve just sort of accepted it.

This picture was taken shortly after graduating from high school and we got an opportunity to go to China. I had high expectations. It’s like a motherland for us and for any of us who are Chinese who were not born in China but feel this kind of pull to go and visit and see where we’re from, and our history, and all the places that my parents or my grandparents talked about. I thought that maybe for the first time, I would feel this connection to a land, to a people, to a place. I didn’t. I felt as much of a foreigner as I did coming to the U.S. the first time or even going back and visiting Korea. I felt very much far away and ultimately, this is how I’ve kind of felt my whole life…this kind of separateness and distance from myself and everybody else around me.

I’m mixed race Japanese. My mom is an immigrant from Japan and my dad is Italian American and they named me Gina, which actually has a meaning in both languages―it’s Italian for queen and Japanese for silver. And then I was named Ariko after my baachan, my mom’s mom. I was the “darkest” kid at school, even being at home or within my own family too. I didn’t look like my mom. I didn’t look like my dad. I remember feeling like I was definitely wrong. In school, we’d be asked to draw self-portraits. Multiple times, I would draw myself with blue eyes. There was a family across the street from us that had a little girl that was the same age as me. She had blond hair and light eyes. I used to really think she looked the “right way” and was envying, particularly her hair. I said to her one time, “I wish I had your hair. I wish I had your hair color,” and she responded, “What? My hair? It’s just hair color.” I could tell that me saying it was the first time she’d ever even thought about her hair color. Even being 6, I remembered clocking her reaction because it said to me, she’s never thought about this and it made me realize I think about this all the time.

In the summers, my mom would take me and my sister back to Japan and we’d stay as long as we could. Most of our time was spent with my baachan and jichan. Both of my grandparents were working artists and had been their whole careers. Their home really was oriented around art making. We had a language barrier but we could draw next to each other. It definitely made me feel like, I like art and you like art and that means I fit in here, when there’s distance and language and other things that made me feel insecure about my enoughness. I had this feeling that this was something that made me part of this family.

For my art major in college, I had to have a capstone project to graduate. I happened to be assigned a professor who was head of the art and art history department. He never liked my work. He was an old White man and was pretty condescending. The night before while installing the show, I can’t even remember specifically what he said but I just remember being devastated. I had paintings of my jichan and baachan, of my mom, and me and my mom all dressed in kimono. I left and went home and sobbed. It really sucked the wind out of my sails and I felt a lot of shame too. It did not seem possible to be an artist, a working artist. I didn’t even really try. Years later, I brought the art work back into my life and had this focus of wanting to be an artist and prioritizing it again. When I was filling out the business paperwork, I filled everything out as Gina Ariko Studio. Seeing “Gina Ariko” gave me this constant reassurance. If she could do it, I could do it and I felt like seeing her name next to mine, she was there with me.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. My parents immigrated to the U.S. 4 or 5 years before I was born. Growing up in the Midwest, I was different than a lot of the people around me in school. We had White teachers and classmates and there was definitely a sense of “I’m not quite like everyone else.” I grew up with a lot of Indian people in my life who all called me Yaminee. When I went to school, I was called a kind of Americanized pronunciation. I was very passive in making any corrections so I just kind of allowed it and that became my name. When I was 10 years old, I moved to Ohio. In middle school was the first moment that somebody called me “Yam.” I hated that somebody called me something that I didn’t ask them to. Later on in high school, somebody casually called me “Yam” and I thought, “I don’t hate that explicitly anymore…maybe I can make this something that is my own.” It was the first time that I had owned my own identity. I didn’t want people to mispronounce my name anymore. I think it started to fit who I was and my personality. I wanted to be just friendly, a happy, go-lucky person and I think that nickname really encompassed who I wanted to be for a long time. I started to gain a sense of confidence and that was around the time I really started embracing my nickname.

I moved here and didn’t know anybody, but it gave me more room to breathe. Because there is so much diversity in Seattle, people have a lot of conversations on embracing identity and this was the first time I’d had to confront any of those feelings before. I was having a melding of personalities where the freedom of “Yam” started to come to this formalness of being an adult. I started having a lot of questions within myself on culturally, who am I? I am very far away from my family. If I want to be immersed in Indian culture, that decision is fully mine. This was the first time that I had to really have that discussion with myself and I wanted to start reincorporating “Yaminee” as an option for people. I started to have more discussions on who who I am in terms of being Indian. I think “Yam” provides me a safe defense of saying I am from America, a more Americanized version, as a warning to people that I wouldn’t necessarily know everything about India because I am from here. I’m not in a place to represent and that’s something that I hold a lot of shame in. The dichotomy between where I sit in my Indian voice and my Americanness has always been a fraught relationship. I think in certain situations, I want to be more Indian and in other cases, I want to hide that and I want to just be seen as me. As far as my name goes, I think saying “Yaminee, but you can call me Yam” is probably going to be where I sit for a long time. I don’t think I see a future where I pick one or the other, but I think I am getting more at peace with being both and having both of those things be part of my identity and who I am and just being more sure in that.

I lived with my grandparents and my mom in China and in 3rd grade, my mom came to USA to pursue her MBA so I continued to live with my grandparents. When I was 12 years old, in the middle of 6th grade, I was told that I need to prep for an interview for the U.S. Embassy to go live with my mom. They also share that my mom has gotten remarried and they didn’t share a lot of details of who the person is but I think they showed me a picture of him. So when I moved in with my mom, I got to meet my new stepdad and he’s a White person. My grandparents and I, we live downstairs and my parents upstairs. I felt like downstairs, nothing felt different. Upstairs, that’s a whole different language, a new person. My stepdad didn’t speak Chinese and I didn’t speak English so there was a lack of communication. He would call me “Zinn.” That was the best way he could pronounce it and my mom would call it that way as well.

In school, I think I felt a lot of feeling of loss because it was a very big transition. There were moments of walking into classroom that have already started, not speaking the language, and just absolutely embarrassment and everybody look at you, and just feeling like having no one to support you. I just have to figure it out or not go. Around middle of 7th or maybe 8th grade, there was a conversation about having easier name for people to pronounce during roll calls. Teachers would just try their best to spell it out or they would call “Charlotte” or something. I think when I first moved here, I didn’t have the language to correct them and it was more like, I just hope that they will know who I am and remember me. So when you go through two or three years of that kind of mindset, your name becomes less of a priority to you. So even after I was able to talk in English, it was still not a priority for me to correct anybody. And because people have such a hard time pronouncing it and remembering who I am, my name, it almost felt like I started to dislike this name. I think the complication that it brought to my life made me almost resent my name.

When I was 15, my grandparents had to go back to China for a year for visa reasons so I was left with my parents. I didn’t live well with them. There was a lot of friction because most of the time I spend with my grandparents so I didn’t really get a chance to get to know my parents on that level. At the time, the only emotions I can remember is anger. I think the anger came from not being able to have any control over my own life and always feeling like the person who got left behind. Eventually I just changed my name to make it easier for people. I would tell them my name is X squared so that they could remember me. I think it was almost like you become invisible for so long that just the only hope is for people to remember you.

I applied for this job here in Seattle at Kiro7 TV. After I interviewed, the news director at the time reached out to my agent and told him he wanted me to change my [last] name. I remember that first conversation I had with my agent and just thinking this seems strange. Not only have I built a career using my name, but it just felt very strange and really inauthentic to suddenly change it to another name and I said, “I don’t even know what I would change my name to,” and I was told to just think of different names. I remember I offered up my husband’s last name, which is Weidert, and I was told, “Nope, not Weidert.” My dad’s name is Kim Song Chhuon. Kim Song is his first name so of course I thought, well, Siemny Kim, Siemny Song. “Kim” did not feel right to me because I know that “Kim” is a traditionally Korean last name. “Song” I felt like I could feel more comfortable with. The news director liked the way “Siemny Kim” sounded. I still felt really uncomfortable because not only would I be taking on a name that is traditionally Korean, but I was also giving up my identifiably Cambodian name. You have to understand that growing up as a refugee in this country, you often feel so invisible under the model minority myth. There just weren’t a lot of Asian Americans who are extremely visible and none who were Cambodian so when I entered my career, I was really proud to be one of the few Cambodians working in tv news and I knew that it was a source of pride for me, but also a source of pride for my community. I remember having a conversation with the news director and shared with him all of my concerns. It was made clear to me that in order for me to accept this job, I would have to be okay with changing my name, that I would have to accept this as a condition of employment.

I always felt uneasy about having changed my name. I felt like I was a sell out. It was always a source of shame for me. Honestly, it was a reminder of how I couldn’t stand up for myself. But I still wanted to be proud of being Cambodian and proud of my refugee roots so on World Refugee Day, I wanted to share that I am a refugee. I found a baby picture, one that was taken of me at the refugee camp before we came here to the United States, but in that picture there’s also a small chalkboard in front of me that has my name on there and also some numbers associated with my status. I wanted people to know that refugees matter and that refugees are among us. But I also felt really uncomfortable because then I would be opening up more questions because people knew me on air as “Siemny Kim,” even my coworkers. It was nothing that I’d ever discussed publicly before and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to admit publicly that I wasn’t strong enough to keep my own name. So instead, I cropped out my name and I just shared the baby picture.