What's in a name

S.G. and his wife had a baby (don't worry, no gurgly baby pictures at the other end of that link) a few weeks ago. A boy. I am very happy for them.

S.G.'s wife is from the Eastern Mediterranean. A wonderful woman, at least as far as I can tell from my few times meeting her. When she came to the US, however, she did not do so to flee violence or repression, or even to better her economic situation (granting that living and working in the US usually betters the economic situation automatically for people from all but a handful of countries). Coming from a family of middle-class civil servants (if memory serves), she entered a green card lottery, won, and decided, rightly, that it would be stupid to pass up an opportunity like that. So when their son was born, she and S.G. named him with a name that is common in her culture, but is obviously not an English name. I know it's none of my business, but I must admit it gave me pause. My question at the time – I was trying to be polite, and no doubt failing miserably – was something along the lines of “any reservations about peer reactions when he is older?” His response was “hopefully he will deal with peer reactions the way the rest of us did.” But frankly, I was not convinced. To put it bluntly, what was going through my head was “you're going to raise him as an American, aren't you? Then why not give him an American name?”

One's given name is the most personal thing one has. It is also indelibly linked with a language and, therefore, with a culture. A person living in one culture that carries a name from another will always be tainted with a trace of “otherness.” Not an individual kind of otherness (a teenager who listens to classical music when all his friends are listening to rock), but a categorical otherness – the person is instantly, and permanently, identified as a member of a group different than that of his peers and kept at arm's length by them. And that can wreak havoc on an adolescent's social development at a critical stage of his life. But wait, it's not that simple, is it? First of all, there are other factor's in one's social adjustment, not just whether kids in school think he is one of them or not, aren't there? Fair enough. But hey, in this day and age, kids need all the help they can get – why handicap them at the get-go?

There is something else that I can't seem to let go of. Is this “categorical otherness” really a bad thing? Well, that depends. I should give the disclaimer that I haven't talked to S.G. or his wife about this, so I really don't know what I am talking about, but I suspect that if I asked them, they would say “No, we're not going to raise him exclusively as an American. He can be both.” And if they didn't, surely there are other parents out there who would. If we accept the premise that your given name links you to a culture by way of language, it would imply that this kid will be raised in two cultures. And that, I believe, is impossible. Not equally, at least. It's one thing to be put on a jumbo jet and sent for six or eight weeks every summer to spend with grandma half way around the world while your parents go on vacation and catch up on their sex life. It's quite another to be permanently connected to one culture while living in another. If you try to belong to two cultures at the same time, you end up belonging to neither in full measure. Life is short enough, and any culture, including our American one (especially the American one, I would argue), is complex enough that fully absorbing, sharing in, and taking advantage of it is plenty challenging for most people. Attempting a second one, or, worse, being forced to attempt a second one by your name, is liable to leave you permanently hanging between two worlds, with one foot in each, but fully grounded in neither.