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.