What's in a name
By De Tran
Every year, when the new San Jose telephone book arrives, I check to see how
many De Trans are listed. This year there are six. A quick search on the World
Wide Web turned up 27 other De Trans listed somewhere in the United States.
Colorado, Florida, Oklahoma, Nevada and Washington listed one each; Louisiana,
Massachusetts, New York and Virginia boasted two. California, not surprisingly,
leads with 14 De Trans. Not bad for a name I acquired by accident.
My name actually is Tran Thanh Do. But when our family came to the United
States, officials misspelled it as Tran Thanh De.
Still, De is a good name. It's versatile. De is a preposition in French and
Spanish. And De is "Ed" spelled backward. In fact, De Tran spelled
backward is Ed Nart. The American immigration history is replete with misspelled
names. My friend, Timothy Patrick Goodman, said immigration officials botched it
so badly that his grandfather was given the surname Goodman when he arrived to
New York City around the turn of the century. And that, he said, was how a
freckled-faced, red-haired Irish lad-"Opie" to his friends-inherited a
Jewish last name.
Living in a new country involves more than just adapting to a new
environment. a new language, a new culture. It also involves having one's name
altered, mis-pronounced. It sometimes means dropping the accent marks that
accompanied one name since birth.
German names lose their umlauts; Latinos drop their tildes; Chinese, Japanese
and Koreans change their names to conform with English phonetics. Vietnamese
eliminate their accent marks.
Sometimes, the very order of one's name is reversed.
I My current name, for example, would be Tran De in Vietnam. In the United
States, after much confusion, almost all Vietnamese immigrants adapt the Western
standard by putting their surname last and their given name first. Many also
drop their middle name to cut down on potential misspellings.
That was how the already-modified Tran Thanh De became De Tran. At least six
De Trans in Santa Clara County had the same idea. Once I applied for loan and
freaked out when the TRW credit reported that I owed Emporium Capwell $10,000.
It was another De Tran.
Tran is a common Vietnamese last name, much more prevalent than Smith or
Garcia in the United States. But Tran is nothing compared to Nguyen-by far the
most dominant surname. Nguyen is to Vietnamese last names what Microsoft is to
the computing world. The Nguyens occupy seven page in the San Jose phone book.
While the following analysis is not exactly scientific, it offers a picture
of the dominance of Nguyens, the No. 1 surname of homeowners in Santa Clara
County. Take the current numbers of Nguyens, Smiths and Garcias in the San Jose
phone book, compare them to the 1990 census, and this is what you get: The
Nguyens would make up 6.5 percent of the Vietnamese-American population in San
Jose and Santa Clara, while Smiths would only comprise 0.2 percent of whites and
Garcias 0.4 percent of Latinos. And that doesn't even take into account the
higher average household density of Vietnamese families.
The original boundaries of Vietnam included the northern part of today's
Vietnam. A warlord named Nguyen Hoang conquered what is now southern Vietnam.
Many of the Nguyens were the descendants of Nguyen Hoang, said Nguyen Van Dai, a
San Francisco poet. King Bao Dai, Vietnam's last emperor, was a descendant of
Nguyen Hoang, Dai said. In old Vietnamese society, Dai said, if someone
contributed to the court, the emperor allowed that person to adopt the royal
last name, a practice much like being knighted.
There ale other historical reasons for the prevalence of the Nguyen name.
During the Tran Dynasty in the 11th to 13th centuries, many of the families of
the prior dynasty courtesans - the Lys - changed their name to Nguyen to avoid
persecution.
Writer Nguyen Qui Duc recalled in an interview that one Vietnamese New Year
he was in Singapore where there are few Vietnamese residents. Homesick, he
called up all the Nguyens in the Singaporean directory and wished them a happy
new year.
Duc, too, recalled the time he was living in Sacramento. He was surprised to
find that some of Vietnamese there had first names like Francisco and Juan. It
turned out that they were advised to pick an American names when they became
naturalized. They decided to choose the names of their American neighbors, who
were mostly Latinos.
In polyglot America, perhaps names like Francisco Tran or Daniel Nguyen or
Timothy Patrick Goodman won't seem odd at all. Perhaps one day, they'll be as
American as apple pie-or at least apple strudel.
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