The Accidental Foreigner

Character Customization: Names

Prior to voice acting, a player could choose a character’s name in a Japanese role playing game. I think the developers provided this option to help players further immerse themselves in the world with names they liked and were familiar with, but I personally liked keeping the canonical names, since no name I chose would be as inventive as “Aerith,” “Chrono,” and “Tidus” (pronounced “tee-dus” — see?!) To this day, couples name babies after these Japanese RPG characters because the names are so unique.

There are times I feel like my own names were chosen by a player at random, one meant to solidify my place in the United States, and the other to tie me to the Taiwanese cultural melting pot. My American birth certificate says I’m Julia. My “Chinese” name is in the space for middle names, spelled in a way that American mouths can nominally pronounce. My “Chinese” name was given to me by my “Japanese” grandmother, who meant it to be a proper Japanese name. Remember, I’m Taiwanese.

Why with all of the quotation marks? I feel it is my lot in life to walk this earth with a complex name tied up with equally complex identity issues. The identity issues not only describe me, a second generation Taiwanese American, on a personal level, but pervade Taiwanese society to this day. Taiwan was colonized by the Dutch, various other European powers, the Qing Dynasty of China, and the Japanese over its 400 years of written history. Prior to that, Taiwan was inhabited by a multitude of aboriginal tribes, each with their own culture and language. A mixture of all of these peoples make up modern day Taiwan.

All of my grandparents were born and raised during the last half of Japanese occupation. They were raised as Japanese citizens, wore kimonos and yukatas, spoke Japanese outside the home and Taiwanese inside the home, and adopted Japanese culture and customs as their own. However, due to fairly extraordinary circumstances, my paternal grandmother’s family moved to Tokyo when she was ten years old, where she lived a completely Japanese life. She finished all of her formal education in Japan, and by all accounts was considered Japanese.

I can only imagine the reverse culture shock she must have felt after marrying my grandfather and returning to Taiwan. One of my strongest impressions about my grandmother was that she felt much too elegant and worldly for the area of Taiwan she and my grandfather lived in. I would like to hope that she was able to find at least one other expatriate to talk to, to reminisce about the old days and to decipher the goings on in their Taiwanese lives. Did she like living in Taiwan? How long did it take her to acclimate? Was she ever called Shigeko again after returning to Taiwan? What did she miss about Japan? How did she manage to conduct her life without learning “Peking-go,” the archaic Japanese term for Mandarin? Unfortunately, I have no answers to these questions; we didn’t have that kind of a relationship when she was alive.

Perhaps my grandmother sensed that we would live parallel lives as perpetual foreigners and gave me the impossible name that I have. There is a particular character in my name that is popular in Japan but hard to read for Mandarin speakers. In Japan, I am Akane, which refers to the brilliant red of Japanese textiles. In Taiwan, I am…still stumping people with how to read my name. But I have no way around it — the name appears on government documents, my mail, and online shopping boxes that land on my doorstep. Whenever I watch a Taiwanese person furrow their brow when seeing my name, I simply introduce myself as Julia. Discomfort abated.

Oddly, my grandmother never referred to me by the name she gave me. I was the first grandchild born in the United States, so perhaps she understood that Julia would serve me better in my American life.* It helps that “Julia” is not hard to pronounce for native Mandarin/Taiwanese speakers and works with the cultural convention of adding “-ah” at the end of names to denote familiarity.

Now that I’m forced to use my Chinese/Japanese name, it almost feels like I’m a proper RPG character exploring this new place, unlocking key areas, speaking to all kinds of wayfarers for literal and figurative direction, and searching for bits and pieces of treasure to aid me along the way. Stay tuned to see how she levels up! (ha…)

*My mother originally wanted to name me “Judy” after a popular Taiwanese celebrity of the time. However, as a new convert to Christianity, someone (wrongly) told her that Judy was more of a Jewish name, and that “Julia” sounded more Christian (read: Roman?), so I am Julia. I find it interesting that my grandmother called me Julia given her contentious relationship with my mother. My mother clearly won that round.