What’s in a name?: Instagram account shares stories of immigrant identity

A new Instagram account is providing a space for immigrants and migrants to talk about their experiences navigating across cultures and languages by sharing the stories behind their names. Dilshad Burman reports.

Anglicizing or entirely changing one’s name is an all too familiar, sometimes necessary evil for immigrants and migrants.

Whether it is for convenience, to fit in or simply because they are fed up of hearing their names butchered daily, immigrants or their children often land up ditching traditional, culturally-specific names for ones that are more easy to pronounce or acceptable in the country they migrate to.

A new Instagram account called ‘Story of Our Names’ is providing a space for immigrants and migrants to talk about these experiences of navigating across cultures and languages by sharing the stories behind their names.

An unmet need

User experience designer JoAnne Wang and service designer Vanessa Toye are American and Canadian-born children of Chinese immigrants. Both have common interests in racial and social justice as well as how the immigrant experience impacts concepts of identity.

They launched the account after Wang’s personal post about her name received an overwhelming response.

“There was such a tidal wave of response to it, more than just the usual likes and whatnot,” explained Wang. “I had so many people sharing their own stories with me and Vanessa and I discussed it and we said, ‘there’s something here, there’s an unmet need to share the importance of name and identity.’

The account was launched on Feb. 1, with the first batch of stories coming from the responses Wang had received.

“There are so many different reasons that people have for wanting to share the story of their name. There are really positive experiences. There are some rather traumatizing experiences and some of it is generational trauma,” said Wang. “In all of the discussions around anti-racism and social justice that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, this is sort of a small niche that people don’t really talk about.”

Toye says with the increased interest in social justice movements in the collective consciousness over the past few years, understanding the concept of microaggressions has been an “interesting learning point.” She hopes the account will expand discussions around systemic racism and how such microaggressions can manifest in daily life.

“There are a lot of generalized understandings of what those microaggressions can look like. But sometimes we don’t really get it until we have these more intimate stories. I think going through names and having that tangible place where people can understand … is one of the goals that we really had with this,” she said. “It becomes a bit more of something that people can latch onto and see the diversity of ways that even just a simple name can have a multitude of potential microaggressions or other challenges.”

“When we think about anti-racism, we’re looking at systemic issues and we’re looking at broader institutional issues, but when we talk about our names, it’s this very personal thing that is actually reflective of some of the broader issues at work in society,” added Wang.

Toye says they’re also hoping to create space for those who haven’t given names and identity much thought but “have been kind of feeling it.”

“[The account] gives them a little bit more of a prompt and a place to process that and what it means for them, because there is so much complication around things like internalized racism and other issues in terms of really understanding your place,” she explained. “So maybe you felt some kind of discomfort, which is usually where it starts from, but you’re not really able to put a name and acknowledge what it actually means until you see it exist more in the world.”

The immigrant lens

Both Wang and Toye stress that there is no single immigrant story and the community is not a monolith.

The account is receiving a variety of submissions and they say they are making space for both positive and negative experiences as well as the grey areas in between.

Toye says that they are encouraging people to share how experiences and interactions around their names both have or haven’t affected them as individuals and how they processed that.

“It is really interesting to see that some of our stories include [ideas like] what does it mean to have shortened your name or to have anglicized it? But there’s also other folks who really don’t feel that impact,” she explained. “So we don’t wanna necessarily cater to one type of story — it’s actually about the diversity of different ways that things can exist. That’s really the goal that we’re working towards here is that a multitude of ways of identity should be able to coexist with each other.”

Wang adds that while the account is first and foremost a place to share and commiserate, they also hope it will provide cross-cultural insight into the immigrant experience and identity.

“We have individuals whose names are ‘too ethnic,’ but then who also have names that non-racialized individuals have considered not ethnic enough. [For example] why is your name Amanda? What do you mean your middle name is Julie? That can’t be right. [Or] that’s not an Indian name. So that can’t be your name,” said Wang.

“That’s a really, really important lens for people who don’t have to think about this to consider, so that when they do meet some one who is racialized, they can maybe approach that introduction with a more open mind — so they don’t make assumptions about what someone’s name should be and what they should sound like.”

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