My favorite nickname was given to me by some boys in jail. I used to visit them once every 2 weeks my fourth year of college, trying to talk with them about school and family and all the things in their lives they could give another try once they were out. But the truth was, I was a middle class half white girl from the northeast who studied foreign affairs and medieval French literature, and they were boys from three Norfolk and Richmond gangs who had been charged with assault, drug offences, and statutory rape. One skinny kid with a stutter, Jerome, had even shot a cop. He told me the one French word he knew: pardon.

I was 22 and did not have a clue as to what I was doing. And yet, every two weeks, I did manage to get the room of 15 to 18 year old males talking about the mundane and the spiritual alike. We told jokes, admitted fears and failures, debated whether it was better to live wild or live long. I also learned their system of names – the names their mothers had given them, the names they had for each other, and the names they gave themselves.

After six months, I had apparently earned my own. Malechai, big, quiet kid who was head of one of the Norfolk gangs stood up and announced, “The boys and I, we decided to give you a name.  As a matter of fact, we all agreed on it,” waving his arm to indicate that the Tidewater boys and even Richmond were in. I said I was flattered, what was it? “It’s Sweet, Sweet Kim.” He paused before sitting back down. “Don’t sweat. We’re not ‘giving you a name’ giving you a name, you know what I mean? You are your own operation, you know that.”

It was soon May. I was about to graduate, leave Charlottesville, take a job in Japan.  I prepared to make my last visit to the detention center to say goodbye to the boys. There had been some turnover that year, and I had already lost some.

Malechai was there, though. He didn’t come to the table, just stood back against the wall. I wrapped up my visit and said my goodbyes. Malechai followed me to the door.

“Your folks coming down from New York for your graduation?”

I said yes.

Then Malechai spoke softly, said he was getting out in a week. He wanted to come by to my graduation party and meet my parents, tell them what a nice young woman I was and how I had given him and his boys so many important things to think about while they were away. He dropped his voice, asked quietly, “Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can stop through and say hello to your mom and dad, Kim?”

The jail-visit program prohibited sharing personal contact information with “the inmates.” But Malechai was looking me in the eye. Was I going to trust him enough to cross paths in the world outside? Or was I going to walk out, into safe anonymity?

I wrote down my address. I gave him the paper. “This is for you, Malechai. Just for you. I’m there until June.” Malechai held the paper in his hands, staring. He finally looked up and said, “I’ll be seeing you.”

Graduation weekend came and went. In two weeks, I would move to Japan.

The day before I left Charlottesville, I got a letter in the mail.

It was from Malechai. He wanted to apologize for not having come by for my graduation party and not having met my family. He was supposed to be released that Tuesday, but got into a fight defending Tyrone Walls from the Tidewater boys and he ended up “hurting one of the kids real bad” so his time was extended. He said he felt bad about that, but felt even worse about asking to meet my mother and father and sister and brother and grandmother, too, and then not showing up. He hoped I wasn’t disappointed. He wished me well in Japan. He would be home in Norfolk in no time and would say hello to his mother for me.

There was a PS.  It said, “Next time I write, I’m going to send you a late graduation present. It will be a bracelet that says ‘Sweet, Sweet Kim’ on it. Do you remember your name? It’s a long one, I know. So I guess I’d better make it a necklace.”

I never got a necklace from Malechai. But I keep the name close to my chest, all the same.

by KTS
San Francisco, CA

My name has an uncommon spelling, one first-generation Mexicanos would never pick: V-i-c-k-i-e. Ie. “ie?” people say, how odd. “Is it short for Virginia?” My parents did not pick the last consonant. They only had the concept: baby girl, alive, unimpaired mover and dancer. Mom says the black nurse who provided the spelling had big white teeth and smelled like peppermint gum.

Above all, my name is a reference- to Victoria, my other half who left LA much before I did.

Victoria my oldest sister who never got to beat me up with her left hand while she curled her hair with her right. I never tagged along anywhere with her and her hoochie friends to “Purple Rain” or to the Glendale Galleria. She dreamt her way to heaven so I could be the big sister to our two younger brothers. So I could beat them with one hand and drink my morning milkshake with the other.

She left so I could take my younger brother Jesse to watch, “Batman Begins,” and to pimple-skinned parties on Jaboneria Street. I’m named after a ghost for whom my mother makes birthday cakes out of Styrofoam discs, lovingly covered with real icing and ballerinas every one of her 36 birthdays.

Victoria took a look at south east LA and said, “Chale, I’ll catch you on the rebound.” Neither she nor I got to be a chola, or a cha-cha, or a new waver. She left me here with thick glasses in fourth grade, these stories and a name to live up to, everyday. Don’t. Fuck. It. Up. Girl.

I was born in Inglewood (“always up to no good”), near LAX, where I would make a maiden voyage to visit colleges 17 years later. How it makes sense - that every night or so, I dream of fly-away places, a deluged mélange of everywhere I’ve lived or seen: an Italian mansion in a Chiapas jungle, with a view to the Caribbean from my sleep.

Victoria- I don’t blame you for not staying. It was all mean-ugly girls through high school, then silent throbbing lack in college. Grad school was warm and got me ready for all work in life. There I learned how to dance cumbia ballenato, or is it “vallenato”? You tell me, girl.

I scribbled across your photo face as a toddler- you in the kitchen on top of our marigold painted table. That’s all I’ve ever had for your likeness. How lovely you might look today, all flirty thirties with our wavy hair and long Mendoza eyelashes, living your life somewhere near silver planes.

And my last name? Vértiz. An accent on the “e” thanks to a Spanish from Spain college professor. I’ve also spotted a certain street named, “Doctor Vértiz” in Mexico City with the accent on the ‘e’ too, melting my guilt over the initial gachupin influence over my young college mind. “But Chata,” says dad wearing cop Ray-Bans with a paper bag in his right hand, “Our last name comes from the name ‘Veretti.’ No sabes que somos Italianos?” Of course we’re Italian. That’s why mom speaks Nahuatl like a sailor. I love how Mexicans always find a blue-eyed granny somewhere in our lineage, but never an Indio or Moor or Moreno. This ass is not Indian, I’ll tell you that much.

All I can tell you is that I was very at home when I arrived in Morocco in 2001. All black arching eyebrows and olive pink skin like mine. They were impressed with my gnawan music dancing abilities. I didn’t have it in me to tell them all their songs sounded just like cumbias.

* tocaya: a girl with the same name as me

by Vickie Vertiz
San Francisco, CA

“Why did you call me Helen?” It is a question I have asked my parents probably thousands of times and they have a deliciously pretentious explanation for my name, and as I’ve grown I have proudly started to perpetuate it. Helen, a Greek name meaning light, (as well as being the face that launched a thousand ships), was chosen for the fact that I was born two months prematurely weighing two pounds two ounces, light by anyone’s definition. It suits me, as one of those no-nonsense, pragmatic names that can carry you through any stage of your life. My mother tells me of their determination to find a name that wouldn’t go out of fashion by the time I was eighty three. Having grown up amongst a generation of Kylies, Staceys and Billy-Jos, I understand the logic behind it. I like having a name that instantly belies my gender, but not my age.

I will be honest and admit, with no offense to my parents, that when I was younger I wanted to be a Becky or a Holly or a Vicky, anything with a y really. There was a girliness to those names, a softness that as an eight year old drowning in my own precociousness, I wished I had. There were no shortened forms of my name, no jolly nicknames. I was a constant, and, at the time, it was maybe too mature a name for my nature. It needed nurturing.

As for my middle name, never has it seemed more fitting. Louise means warrior, and from the second I was born it feels as if I have had to fight. As a child, I was a regular at accident and emergency, riddled with severe asthma attacks and often arriving on the verge of turning blue. A year and a half ago, I shattered a disc in my lower spine, and currently, spending a day out of the house has turned into a battle. There was no small amount of prophecy on my parents’ part.

The adult me loves my name, and revels in its practicality. I may never win any prizes for glamour but, like my real life self, my name offers a steeliness and a strength of character that I have worked hard to develop. There is tough love in the name Helen.

The real beauty of my name, as with the scientific beauty of faces, lies in its symmetry. Helen Dring lies on the page beautifully, a perfect ten letters.

by Helen Dring
Liverpool, United Kingdom

Have you ever been in the cereal aisle at your local grocery story debating between the bunches and the clusters or the pops and the puffs, only to hear your name called by a face of which you have no remembrance? Yes, it has happened to us all–except me of course. You see I have this name filter that allows me to know the nature of my relationship with anyone: ever-present or forgotten, dead or alive.

In the beginning, there was Justin. Though not my first name, family and loved ones have called me Justin since birth. Why this occurred yet remains a mystery. Coincidence or not, my mother and father also go by their middle names. For quite some time, this name served as my only identity, that was until Pre-Kindergarten.

Until the age of five I knew my name, but had never been called Joseph. When it happened, I did not quite know how to react. The only thing I did know was that I hated the epithet Joe. It was shortly after this point I realized my two names had separate meanings, separate responsibilities. Justin is well-known, well-loved: the first of a new generation. Joseph is well-learned, well-liked: one of twenty-something faces in a classroom. Despite my vehement distaste for Joe, by junior high Jo grew on me. The split began.

While Justin was the funnest cousin, the sweetest grandchild, and the most well-mannered church member. Jo was rambunctious, smart-lipped and, by high school, liable to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol. These characteristics, however, could never cross paths. If they did, my illusions would fail and I would have to find a way to amalgamate all that was Justin Joseph Jo into one person. This of course didn’t happen, for there was at least one more alias to add.

College years brought about the need for a personal renaissance. I had grown weary of Jo and his antics, Justin was too sheltered, and Joseph was still a child. Fret not, for Jodi was the answer to them all. It was he who spoke with power and conviction, he who dressed with the utmost sartorial excellence, he who fearlessly trotted the globe, he whose scholastic endeavors were met with honors, he who has fallen in love more than most, he whose spirit was far beyond his years–the one with the bulletproof smile.

As I have matured, it has been my challenge to make loveable Justin join badass Jo join baby Joseph join everyman Jodi. I have not arrived yet, but one thing is sure. Whenever I am approached by an unfamiliar face, I will always know how we are connected by what they call me.

by Joseph Justin Pye
Atlanta, GA

We were having coffee with Jane at the Chocolate Fish cafe, sitting at the outside tables by the beach and over the road from the cafe itself.  Hitomi was about to burst, so it must have been late August. A wonderful late winter’s day in Wellington, with beautiful sunlight and a nasty wind-chill factor.

We got on to the topic of whether ‘it’ was a boy or a girl. For most of the pregnancy both of us had been, in traditional fashion, very coy when the topic arose. By this time, however, with only a couple of weeks to go until the due date we were less guarded. We told Jane that ‘it’ was a girl, and the talk naturally moved to names.

Up until then we had also been a bit coy with regard to telling people our likely picks for baby names, just in case they were ‘baby name robbers’, who wanted to steal the outstanding baby name we had fretted over for such a long time and give it to their own babies. Anyway, at this point, we figured that telling Jane our great baby name idea was no big deal.

“Mimi,” I said.

”I beg your pardon?” came Jane’s puzzled reply.

“‘Mimi’ is our current favourite,” I said. “We want something that is short, cute, and sounds good in English as well as Japanese.”

Hitomi explained. “We want something that the kid will be happy with, regardless of whether we are living here or back in Japan. The word ‘mimi’ means ‘ear’ in Japanese, but we would use different characters to give it a different meaning. Japanese people wouldn’t think ‘ear’ when they called her name.”

“Oh,” said Jane.

“It’s easy for both Japanese people and English speakers to pronounce,” I added.

“Where do you see yourselves living in the future?” Jane asked.

“Not really sure,” we said in unison.

“Well,” started Jane. “If you think she might be going through the school system here in New Zealand, then you might want to think of a different name.”

“Why do you say that,” I asked.

“Well, when we were at school in the seventies and eighties, we would learn a bit of Maori language, right? Greetings and things, yeah?”

She was right. Learning some Maori words had been part of the curriculum for a long time. Every New Zealander can smuggly rattle off the numbers one to ten, and feel like they are exhibiting a high degree of prowess in the native language.

“So?” I queried.

“Well, things have moved on,” said Jane. ” In some schools, the kids even end up being able to hold a decent conversation in Maori.”

“OK,” I said. “So what has this got to do with our choice of baby names?” I asked.

Well,” started Jane again. “Nowadays, every seven year old in the country knows that ‘mimi’ means ‘urinate’ in Maori.”

by Mia’s dad
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

I’m not quite sure I have a name. Ever since I can remember people have always stumbled over what I think my parents intended it to be. I’m not even sure telling it would do any good. You probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. I usually just lie to people, “it’s Jerry”, to eliminate the possibility of an awkward exchange: yelling, questioning, or whispering into the ears of one another. I’m sure those of you with exotic names can agree with me that nine times out of ten when you try to introduce yourself either a stereo blasts, a party starts, a baby cries, or all the above.

It’s providence. Who or whatever up there must agree that my name isn’t a good one. Unique, yes. Good, no. But hey, I’m not complaining. Nowadays it’s not such a bad thing to have what I’ve got, that is, if you’re a terrorist. No two ID’s of mine are the same, achieving what every Al-Qaeda operative trained and ran through a remote deserted desert for: official illegitimate legal documents - all variations of one another, like a game of telephone.

It’s not my fault and it’s not my parents fault. Which, if it’s not really anybodies fault maybe it isn’t even anything. Not even a name. Just an unforeseen eruption of word vomit from my mother’s mouth after laboring for five hours in that sterile white hospital room 49 years ago.

The nurse ran in with her gray clipboard and shouted at my mother, “What are you gonna call it?!”

She said, “Jaron.”

by Jaron Hershel
Washington D.C.

Bobby Joe

photo by Brynn Metheney
Oakland, CA

“So how’s your name most commonly mispronounced?” asked Shawni, my friend’s sister. It was Memorial Day and I had been lucky enough to get invited to someone’s BBQ by my friend Dana.  As more guests jostled the metal gate to enter into the backyard, numerous introductions were made, followed by the customary enunciation of my name.

I looked at her intently for a second and replied “I don’t know, you know people have been mispronouncing my name my whole life.”

”People call her by different names,” Dana interrupted. “Debbie calls her I-dee ,..I call her Ay-day”

“Well how is it supposed to be pronounced?” asked Shawni.

“Like air in Spanish but with a d instead of an r.”

“Aidé. Aidé,” Shawni repeated in a perfect Spanish accent.

“But my family, including my mother, call me Heidi,” some of the other guests began giggling.

“How did that happen?” one of the women asked.

“I think it is the best way that my brothers and sisters found to anglicize my name, and it just stuck. In fact to this day, they enjoy calling me Heidi-Whitey.” And then all the ladies around the table laughed even louder than before.

In all honesty, I rarely notice the way people pronounce my name. Most of the time, I can tell when someone is talking to me, or about me; and for the most part I let people call me what they will or what they can, hoping that they will come closest to the best approximation of what my mother intended.  But even getting down to her intentions is problematic for me.  As the youngest of five children my siblings have important names that seem to carry their own familial and historical weight. The first set of twins (my family consists of two sets and then me), Alma and Saul, are named after people that none us children ever knew but are nonetheless important figures in the Rodriguez chronicles: My sister was named Alma which means soul in Spanish and Ophelia after my father’s mother who died at a very young age in childbirth. Saul was named after Saul Celis who was killed in a wild-west family feud style gunfight when he was 16, in my parent’s hometown; he had been my father’s best friend. The second set of twins, Emma and Bernabe (Bernie) are named after my parents.

But when I asked my mother who I was named after she said, “…I don’t remember if it was a Venezuelan soap opera actress or soap opera character…” Of course, I have no idea who this woman may have been on screen or in real life. And as much as I would like to know what Aide the actress looked like, or whether Aide the T.V. character was the charismatic protagonist of the telenovela, I find some comfort that once free of the obligation to honor their loved ones and themselves, my parents gave me a name that they simply liked and appreciated for the way it sounded. Like aire but with a d.

by Aide Rodriguez
San Francisco, CA

Confucius once said
If the name is not right
Language will carry no might
So my father created my name
By rearranging the sun and moon
Vertically and horizontally
To equip it with all
The forces of yin and yang
Dispersed in the universe

Since I became subject
To a totally different grammar
All people have complained
Or made fun of my name
So harsh and awkward
They conspire to seduce me
To adopt a familiar one
Like Michael in the powerful speech

But to retain the subtle balances
In the wild wild world I wander
To hold my father’s sunbeam
With my mother’s moonlight
I fiercely refuse to change it
Even though I often feel lost
When the sounds I hear
Do not sound like my name at all

by Changming Yuan
Vancouver, Canada

When I was born my parents gave me the name “Elizabeth” and I was called this until I was 8 years old. Then like most other Elizabeths, I became Liz. I think it was friends who started calling me Lizard. I liked it because it was a name no one else had. It was unique to me alone.

I suspect it was the fear of entering JR High that normalized my name back to Liz. And Liz was my name until, at age 25, I asked to be called Elizabeth from here on after. I sent an e-mail to my friends and family and even my landlord. This was met by acceptance and confusion.

Why Elizabeth? Why now? E-liz-a-beth - it consisted of four syllables. It came off the tongue with more effort, thus more distinction. It was nuanced and complicated. It was necessary to make a loophole through. I wanted to control my identity; to tell others who I was. It’s hard though, to change how others see you. So, I decided that if you had known me for at least five years, you could call me Liz.

When I turned 29, I moved to California. Here was my chance! When I said Elizabeth, it was never questioned. But within a year, it was taking a toll on me. Whereas before the multi-syllables were mysterious, now they were burdensome. They seemed ornate and unnecessary. I felt that by going by this name I was somehow betraying my true self.

So once more I started using Liz, without an official announcement. My grad school classmates made the transition easily but my professors were a little slower. Upon hearing “Liz” they would ask if this is what I went by - as if they had been mistakenly calling me Elizabeth for the past 7 months.  Then, yet again, I had to answer the seemingly endless questions. Do you go by Elizabeth or Liz? Which one do you like better?

Just call me Liz, I say. It’ll make it easier for everyone.

by Liz Bacon Jones
Oakland, CA