The Project
Stories of AANHPI women and their names.
Over the course of two years, My Name Story project was conducted over two sessions with each of the nine project participants. In the first session, participants were asked to bring photos from their past that felt significant to their name journey. They looked over their photos and were invited to share the story surrounding each one. With gentle guidance, participants selected photos that elicited the most emotion and meaning to them.
In the second session, participants spent several hours being interviewed on camera by Judy, with Tatyana as the videographer, and revisiting highlights from the stories they shared in the first session. During the interview, participants engaged in a therapeutic component by processing their selected photo and writing letters to their younger selves which they read them on camera.
The multi-session process was designed to be a connecting and healing experience for participants.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Judy Lee, Narrative Artist
I immigrated to the U.S. when I was six years old and started 1st grade in Queens, NY. Along with my brother, three cousins, and parents who didn’t speak English, I went to P.S. 70 to register for school. Our parents gave the White woman registering us our Korean names but rather than listing them as is, she took the sounds from our names and assigned each of us “American” names. “Eun Shil” became “Jill,” “Chan Ik” became “Charles,” etc. My name, “Yon Joo” became Judy. These became our unofficial “go by” names, which eventually became our legal names when we obtained U.S. citizenship.
Experiences like mine are common among Asian Americans (AANHPIs). Whether we were assigned new names from outsiders, our parents, or chose to change them ourselves, our names represent the tension we feel living in a country that sees us as perpetual foreigners and fails to make room for our complex identities. Changing our names came with the promise of belonging but no matter what “American” name we took on, how perfect our English was, or how we threw away the ethnic lunches our parents lovingly packed for us, belonging eluded us. While times are changing, Asian Americans continue to be asked, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?”―a seemingly innocuous question that assumes we are always from elsewhere, never here.
My Name Story project tells the stories of our experiences through our names. They reflect the complex journeys of our intersectional identities, to belonging, and, for some, reclamation. While these stories focus on individual experiences, the threads that weave our name journeys point to broader questions about race. As you explore these stories, I invite you to ask yourself, Who gets to be “American” in our country? What does being an “American” look like? and Who gets to belong?
