Naming Our Identity

 Students created identity charts and will explore the significance of names.
Homework due Monday Sept 12: Read "It's in the Name" and "My Name". Choose 1 to respond to. Reread. Write down:
-3 things you learned (inferences about the narrator, what the author is trying to communicate to readers)
-2 questions you have about it; what don't you understand?; what would you like to discuss further?
-1 or 2 lines you like best; what do they mean?; why do you like them?

“It’s in the Name” Kitty Tsui I’ve been called sway      sue      suey      suzy      tissue      ha-chiew. my father pronounced it choy so i grew up saying choy, always careful to add: t-s-u-i. the first name is kit fan, fragrant purity. but can also mean marriage. in chinese, choy can also mean hurry, fast, faidee. i am constantly chased by the chant hurry to get married… if it’s not bad enough it’s in the name it’s also in the face. one day a woman instructor insisted i had been one of her guest speakers in a class. she was so sure of herself she had me convinced it was during my alcohol days when memory was gone. genny lim was the speaker. it happens all the time. orientals so hard to tell apart.

the same day a woman stopped to wish me a good opening. i was not in a play or an art show. zand gee, nancy hom and stephanie lowe had a three-woman show. that’s not all. I’ve been called willyce kim, canyon sam, louise low. it happens all the time. a newspaper woman thought i was willyce kim for months. willyce kim gets called susan kwong. nellie wong is made nellie kim or not mentioned by name at all. merle woo is called merle wong or smeared as yellow woman in a gay male publication. it happens all the time. it’s in the name. it’s in the face. orientals so hard to tell apart. our faces, strong, brown, different as the bumps on the skin of bittermelon. our tongues, sharp and fragrant as ginger,

telling our history, our experiences as asian american women, workers and poets, cutting the ropes that bind us, breaking from the silence of centuries. to write our dreams into action, give voice to our visions and tongues to our foreparents, those who entered at Chinese hospital or the paper sons who came by way of angel island, forced to take false names. the sewing shop worker, the secretary, the doctor, the deem sum girl, The lesbian, the bike messenger, the typesetter, the boxer, the student. each with a name. each with a face, blood, bone, breath.

“My Name”

From The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.