People have always told me not to change my name. Some insisted that they liked it: Bich, a Vietnamese name, given to me in Saigon, where I was born and where the name is quite ordinary. When my ...

I don't have a common name, and I would dread my first day of school. I thought that once I got a job, people would make more of an effort to spell my name correctly. Now I correct people every time ...

When you’re that age, any point of difference is a source of deep embarrassment, and having a foreign name is just another one in the mix—from shrugging off rhyming jibes to correcting, or being too ...