Roll call day was always the worst for me. I remembered feeling this burning pit in my stomach. As the teacher slowly reads off the long list of Jessicas, Gabriellas, Alexanders but call me Alex, Jonathans, and finally stumbling onto Ngoc.
I am already red with humiliation.
There is a silent pause as he reads over my name. He squints as if it helps him figure out a way to say my name without completely butchering it. It was obvious that he had never seen these letters strung together in this order before.
The incomprehensible combinations of these letters ‘N-g-o-c’ makes pronouncing my name a burden I’ve carried my entire life. A name which I refused to even pronounced myself or ask others to correct since I felt as if it was a hassle many wouldn’t want to bargain for.
I watched him give up and resort to just spelling my name out, but before he could reach the ‘o’ I cut in loud and quick by saying “I just go by Sabrina actually.” And from there, he smiled (thanking me for saving him and myself from the embarrassment) and noted on the paper to call me by my nickname instead.
My nickname ‘Sabrina’ has been a name I’ve gone by since kindergarten and the first English word I learned how to spell and memorize. I came to the United States when I was two and always felt as if Ngoc had no place in the English language.
At a young age and having an unhealthy obsession with Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I fell in love with the way the name Sabrina rolled off of the character’s tongue. How the ‘S’ effortless breathes on its own, as the ‘b’ comes down heavily, and finishes off with clinging to the last ‘a’.
However, my father speaks mostly Vietnamese to me and the tones of his commands is a forceful dialect. With his rigid, hard, rutted sounds it almost felt as if he was only pronouncing curse words at me. Sixteen years in this country and his tongue refuses to bend and soften for the English language like mine did.
At times, I felt a weight of embarrassment as I watched my father struggle with his heavy Vietnamese tongue, which grasps itself so forcefully around simple English syllables and leaving no room for them to breathe. The meaning and beauty were strangled out from these words that I learned to admire in school.
The unease of never using my name over the years made me even cringe as I pronounced it to others or filled it out on applications till this day.
At the start of a new semester, I met a girl who only knew me by my nickname but saw my ID of course with my birth name bolded and capitalized. She takes the requisite pause. I held my breath tightly as she kindly yet quietly asked me “How do I pronounce your name?”
I hesitantly looked at her and with a large breath said, ‘Ngọc.’ There was an immediate rush of redemption as my Vietnamese dialect and accent rolled off my tongue fluently, leaving no room for translating my name to suit the English word of ‘knock.’ For the first time in living in America, I never have let myself pronounced my own name this way before.
After her attempts of learning to repeat it back to me several times until she got it right, I vividly remembered her American tongue struggling to find its strength and force my father had with his to say my name so beautifully. Eventually, my name rolls off her tongue the same way Sabrina has for everyone else. And I have never felt so deserving of a name, my name.
While I still use Sabrina and rarely touch upon Ngoc, my name is still Ngoc. It will always be a tough 'N' clinging to the soft and silent 'g', which then rolls into a silky 'o' and hangs loosely on the 'c'.
