Names

By Lim Kang-mo

Judge Early. Tamie Brown. John Bible. John King. Barbara Boxer. Jonathan Super. Sylvia Read. Sherri Whitehead. Roy Fox. Duncan Hunter. Tom DeLay. Jon Tester. Jonathan Alter. Elaine Lawless. Julie Goodnight. Kevin Parent. Jim Loveless. David Goodfriend. Catherine Fake. Dana Bash. Edward Said. Don Rivers. Britney Spears. Brooke Shields. Karen House. Paul Farmer. Hirsh Goodman. Maggie Lake.

These names look like a genealogy of the first chapter of Matthew in the New Testament. But they are a part of my collection of interesting names. I don't know exactly when I started to have an interest in English names. What I clearly remember was the moment when my daughter was born at University Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, 1996, when I met a social worker at the hospital. Her name was Julie Goodnight. She was gathering my daughter's information from me. I was excited to be a daddy and nervous because I was 27 years old and a graduate student. But I was more pleasantly surprised to notice her name, GOODNIGHT, and I was laughing due to her name. Maybe the social worker just thought I was happy enough to have an American-born daughter.

After my master's degree in English Education, I went back to Korea in 1997. I started to teach a course named ``Advanced Listening’’ at the International Language Institute in Seoul. I started to use CNN News clips as class material to improve my students' listening skills. I started to notice interesting English names _ John King, Dana Bash and so on, usually news reporters' names. Whenever I see their surnames, I start to wonder about their ancestors. My questions: ``Why do they have their family name like that?’’ and ```Who was the first ancestor using the name and why?’’

In 1981, I became a freshman at a junior high school in Seoul. Being a freshman in junior high school was something. First, I had to wear school uniforms: One was black for fall and winter; the other was blue for spring and summer. Second I had to almost shave my hair. It was not pretty for me as much as it was not for Britney Spears.

One spring day of that year, one of the bullies in my class, sitting behind me, started to tease me, calling me, ``GGang-Naeing-I,’’ which is the name of traditional popcorn. It is not sweet like the American kind, but a bit bitter, and a good snack for people. I was bothered by his teasing since he was not my friend, and we were just newcomers in our semester. I stood up and smacked him. His nose collapsed and sprayed blood over my blue uniform, as we tangled.

In 1994 I came to America to study the English language. I happened to take a course with a writer who also came from Korea, at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, Missouri. The instructor of the class we shared was always pronouncing my name as ``KWANG-Mo.’’ One day, playfully and purposely I didn't answer his call. He was puzzled about my audacity of not answering the roll call. I stood up and said, ``That's my uncle's name’’ All of my classmates laughed.

Later, the writer, Jin Lee, published her book ``The Dormitory of Harvard,’’ which included a short story titled ``That's my uncle's name.’’ She thought of me as a struggling Korean young man, who was trying to keep his identity. Thanks, I was.

``Everyone, I am a relative of George W. Bush,’’ I said at a college conversation class in Seoul in 2004. I started to use my name collection for my class for ice breaking in a new semester. My students started to laugh at me. And I slowly wrote down my family name in Chinese letters on the whiteboard and explained how the Bush family is related to my family _ the Lim family. After they listened to my explanation, their faces were puzzled. ``The meaning of the word, ‘Lim is Bush,’ I said. Maybe my ancestors could have lived together in Babel Tower in Mesopotamia with the Bush family, and God confused the language and people could have started to use different sounds and letters.’’

The Bush family started to use Bush, and my family started to use Lim. But the meanings are the same.

In 2006, in Columbia, Missouri had changed. There were more Korean students and visiting scholars, and a more obvious mood of being ``internationalized’’ pushed me to feel like a global citizen. I came back to Columbia again to be a doctoral student this time. Many people wanted to call me Kangmo. They seemed to put value on our own culture. I appreciated that multiculturalism was going on in Columbia, compared to 10 years ago. I appreciated their efforts. I was pleasantly surprised. Nevertheless, one of my classmates mistakenly called me ``Cosmo’’ last semester. It was a funny association to me since Michael Richards, the actor who plays Cosmo Kramer on the television program, ``Seinfeld,’’ was in trouble for his racial remarks. In this year a staff of UNA-USA called me ``KANGO,’’ mistakenly.

I have started to struggle again with my name in grand America. As William Zinsser noted: ``the concept is already in the noun,’’ I want to believe the same applies to my given name, KANG-MO, but this time with more ``peace’’ and ``law.’’

kltwb@missouri.edu

The writer is a student at the University of Missouri.