The Name Game
My full name is Nguyen Tu Duc Hanh.
Tu means compassion.
Duc means virtue.
Hanh means taking action.
I think my mum was trying to tell me to grow up and take actions to do virtuous and compassionate things.
It’s interesting that now, at 23, I am studying to become a social worker.
My name was so unique and uncommon that my parents were concerned it would create problems for me at school. When I was five, they asked me if I would like to get rid of one of my middle names to make my name simpler and easier to remember. I said no. Even at five years old, with no understanding of what my name meant, I had a strong sense of pride in it.
Throughout my childhood and early teenage years, I received a lot of compliments for my name. It always surprised people. Some would — upon learning it — say it over and over in amazement. Everyone thought it was a beautiful name. All the compliments probably had something to do with the current size of my ego.
My mum and I moved to Australia when she remarried. I was 13. My Australian stepfather only knew me by my mum’s nickname for me, Tun — so when he enrolled me in school, he enrolled me as such. Eventually, all official paperwork was corrected to reflect my real name, but the nickname stuck around — everyone called me Tun for the remainder of high school.
The stubbornness of the Australian Department of Immigration only added onto the confusion. It was relatively simple: Nguyen is my last name, Tu my first middle name, Duc my second middle name, and Hanh my first name. The Vietnamese passport convention was to write middle names first and last name last, so my name in my passport was “Tu Duc Hanh, Nguyen”. That did not change the fact that my first name was my first name, yet this was apparently impossible for the Department of Immigration to understand. For seven years of permanent residency, my ‘official’ name was Tu. Everyone called me Tun. And I was Hanh.
I never liked the name Tun. It was a cute nickname, but I was worried that no one would take me seriously when I myself struggled to take that name seriously. At uni, for the first time, I had the freedom to decide what I would be called — so I told everyone my name was Hanh. Now I am in a weird spot, with everyone who had met me prior to 2016 still calling me Tun, and everyone who has met me from 2016 onwards calling me Hanh. Having these people in the same room can be a bit of a nightmare.
When I applied for Australian Citizenship, I was determined to make sure that all of the paperwork reflected my name accurately. I doubled checked, triple checked every document I handed in — first name Hanh, middle names Tu Duc. Somehow, the confirmation email for my application still said my first name was Tu.
I arrived at the citizenship interview, ready for vengeance. I firmly told the interviewer that my name was Hanh, patiently explained the differences in name conventions, and politely asked for documents to be corrected. He said that he could either put my name down as Tu Duc Hanh (as reflected in my passport) or Hanh Duc Tu (reversed). He was apologetic that there was nothing else he could do. He advised that upon receiving my citizenship certificate, I could apply for a name change under the reason that my name was ‘incorrectly recorded’. I decided to go with Hanh Duc Tu — then at least my first name was correct, though I knew I would definitely need to apply for a name change afterwards. ‘Hanh Duc Tu’ was not the name on all of my existing official documents, including my driver’s license and Bachelor’s diploma.
A few months later, I applied for a name change on my citizenship certificate. I paid $200 for the application. I was informed that I would be refunded if the Department determined that it was them that had made an error.
My name is correct now. But I am still $200 poorer.
There remains one issue — pronunciation. Vietnamese is a difficult language, with nuances and accents that can barely be detected by the English speaker’s ear. I don’t expect anyone to be able to say my name accurately, so I took the initiative to bastardise the pronunciation. ‘Nguyen’ became ‘when’ and ‘Hanh’ became ‘Hæn’ (similar to the ‘æ’ sound in hand).
This apparently hasn’t been enough. My last name has been pronounced in every way possible, from ‘Nugen’, to ‘Nugget’, to the hilarious, yet bewildering, ‘Onion’. When it comes to my first name, the common pronunciation is ‘Han’, with the ‘a’ sound like that in the Han Dynasty of China. Most people stop pronouncing it this way and correct themselves after hearing me say my name several times. Others struggle; some fail altogether. I have colleagues I work with 5 days a week, and friends I’ve known for months, if not years, continue to pronounce my name ‘Han’. The longer I let it go on, the more difficult and awkward it becomes to correct them — so I just don’t.
My mum — suffering from the same fate as me — taught me the policy of simply not caring. For her, it doesn’t matter whether someone remembers her name or says it correctly; it only matters if they know who she is and treat her with respect. This is my approach in most situations — I don’t usually bother to correct people and I don’t take offense. It is usually pretty easy to tell whether someone is making a mistake or being deliberately flippant and disrespectful. This carefree approach has saved me from a lot of awkward conversations.
Others, however, don’t think I should tolerate it. When my friends encourage me to correct people directly, I usually just laugh it off and change the topic. However, I remember when my manager supported me to find a way to constructively correct my colleague, I decided to give it a go. She was right — this would keep happening throughout my life, and I needed to learn how to correct people without confronting them.
Telling my colleague that they had been pronouncing my name wrong for 10 weeks was an incredibly nerve-wracking experience. I was very worried about whether the conversation would become hostile, whether they would feel humiliated or attacked, and how this was going to affect our relationship going forward. I spent the day before writing down exactly what to say and practicing it over and over in my head. On the day of, I nervously waited until they were in a relaxed mood. I said that I did not mean to criticise or accuse them of anything, and this had not bothered me, but they pronounced my name differently to how I pronounced it — and I was wondering why. I made sure to remain cheerful, with the best patient and understanding look I could muster up — even with my level of anxiety. They were surprised by what I said; they simply had no awareness that they were pronouncing it wrong. In fact, they could not hear the difference between what I said, ‘Hæn’, and what they said, ‘Han’, until I pointed it out. They thanked me for correcting them and told me they would spend the entire weekend reflecting on this. From then on, they never pronounced my name incorrectly again.
The conversation was productive and helpful for me as well — I learnt a lot about communication, about what my name meant to me, and about what I expect from other people. But it sure was stressful. I have not since done it again.
I have a friend who recently moved from Vietnam to Australia. One of the first things I told her was to use an English name. I told her it would make her life a whole lot easier.
I am a little jealous that she got to choose an English name. I used to daydream about all the different names I could have chosen, if only I was given the choice. It would have made my life a lot easier too.
When I moved to Australia, I very quickly lost a lot of my personal, familial, and cultural connections. My immediate family was scattered across the globe, with mum at home in rural Northern Territory, my sister in America, and me at boarding school in Victoria; I saw my mum only a few months a year and rarely spoke to my sister. I wasn’t particularly close with my extended family, so I didn’t have any contact with them. The old friendships I had back in Vietnam didn’t last very long — they all inevitably faded after a year or so. The boarding school I went to was in a small city in rural Victoria, so there were barely any Asian students; I had only friends who were white Australian. I knew no other Vietnamese people in Australia, and even when I moved to Melbourne — where there are large, tightknit Vietnamese communities — I felt like an outsider. I didn’t feel very Vietnamese.
Frankly, back then, I was glad to not feel, look, or act Vietnamese. My determination to fit in and my natural adaptability meant I was able to create a very effective ‘Australian’ persona. If someone asked me where I was from, I said Australia. I bought new clothes, learnt to put on make-up, spoke Vietnamese only in private. I even unfollowed all of the Vietnamese pages I used to follow on Facebook, ensuring a complete digital separation from Vietnam. I was so afraid of being the stereotypical over-achieving Asian student, I learnt to act dumb — like I was bad at maths, like I didn’t care about my grades, like I had no interest in studying. The Vietnamese parts of myself — my language, my friends, my clothes, my mannerism, my ancestry, my history — did not fit into my carefully-crafted ‘Australian’ persona. So I gave them all up.
I guess I can say my efforts were successful. People were often pleasantly surprised by how ‘Australian’ I was; some even going as far as ‘complimenting’ me for being “the most Australian Asian” they had ever met. I rarely ever experienced racism or discrimination; any instances being minor, insignificant. I met wonderful people, made many good friends, created a good support system for myself. But I never stopped feeling like an outsider. I never stopped feeling like I belonged nowhere.
It wasn’t until I became friends with an Asian person at university that I realised it was okay to be Vietnamese. I was in awe as I watched them being unashamedly, openly, and proudly Cambodian. As I sat in their house — a classic big Asian family, with too much food for anyone to consume, children running around laughing, aunties singing karaoke, everyone shouting at the top of the lungs just to talk to the person two seats away from them — I missed home for the first time in my six years in Australia. I missed my family. I missed being Vietnamese.
Piece by piece, I am rebuilding my connections to my culture. I learn to cook more Vietnamese food. I try to speak Vietnamese when I meet other Vietnamese people, despite struggling through every sentence. When people ask me when I’m from, I say Vietnam. I tell people stories and I write about my family, my culture, my country. I spend time thinking about what it means for me to be not only Vietnamese, but also Australian, and how those identities co-exist.
In this journey, my name is more important to me than ever. It is an immediate, daily reminder that I was born in a proud country with a proud history. That I was raised by a mother who encourages individuality and believes in my potential to meaningfully contribute, both to my family and my community. That I am a first-generation immigrant, still trying to find the Australian dream. That I am Vietnamese.
People are not going to stop pronouncing or spelling my name wrong — and I don’t hold anything against them. I don’t immediately assume that people are racist or disrespectful — that would be both exhausting for me, and unfair for them. But I do think that you should always at least try. Try to pay attention when an Asian person tells you their name. To ask for clarification and double check whether you are saying the name correctly. To correct other people when they are pronouncing or spelling the name inaccurately. To keep in mind the significance of someone’s name, and its intricate link to their sense of identity, family, community, and belonging. That would be enough.
I would say, however, that if I could learn to say bewildering white names like Siobhan and Seamus, then I think it’s probably reasonable to expect that white people can learn to say Hanh. Or to at least spell it right in emails — it is literally right there in my email address. A little effort could go a long way.
