On Names

When I introduce myself and people ask my name, I have one answer, whether they speak French, English, German, Japanese, Korean... I only want one answer, that is my name. I can't imagine people calling me anything other than Elyssa - or at least some phonetically distorted equivalent ^^. I expect my name to be said differently by a French speaker and an English speaker, and therefore every other language has its own version. Thus it is a strange thing to know people by English pseudonyms. As much as I can get annoyed when people butcher my name (by that I mean English speakers calling me Alyssa, or French speakers calling me Elise), I would much rather that to taking on a new name. Of course much of this may be habit, everyone may not feel the same way, but to me it is like a barrier to intimacy, to a certain part of people are.

The first time this came to mind was realizing I could not find many of my Korean friends on facebook. The second was talking to a co-teacher's boyfriend who introduced himself as "so-and-so's boyfriend" - using her Korean name, which I had never heard.
It made me curious to see if it was just about making life easier for us foreigners or if they enjoyed the idea of having an English nickname. Of 11 students I asked, two actually preferred their English names, but all the others preferred their Korean names and several seemed somewhat uneasy with their English names. Two of them were arbitrarily assigned their names on the first day of class by teachers and have had them since. Even if some do prefer having another name, the notion that every kid needs one seems misplaced. In one class there was this interesting love for English names combined with a preference for the Korean names. They found English names beautiful, as one student put it, but it wasn't them.

I'm probably thinking about this way too much (no surprise there, though), but I can't help wondering what our names mean to us, and what I am telling my kids when I call them by some randomly assigned nickname.