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Names carry significant weight, often serving as a fundamental part of our identity and influencing our interactions with the world. Tune into the Insight episode titled “What’s In A Name” on Tuesday, April 14, at 8:30 PM on SBS or stream it on SBS On Demand, to explore this intriguing question: “Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?”
When Yu Hung’s family relocated from Taiwan to Australia at the age of four, her parents advised her to adopt an English name to better assimilate and avoid becoming a target of bullying, as she was among the few Asian students at her school.
Now at 30, Yu reflects on how this decision backfired, as her “old-fashioned” English name made her stand out even more in her largely white Brisbane community.
“Judy isn’t a name you’d typically associate with young children,” Yu shared with Insight.
“It became another indicator of my difference and a sign of not fully blending in.”
Yu started school in the early 2000s and dreaded every time the roll was called in class because her English name was not used officially.
“You get to the point where … I know that my name’s coming up and the teacher — especially if it was a substitute teacher — would have that ‘ethnic pause’,” Yu said.
“Where they’d get to [my Mandarin name] — and they can’t pronounce it.”
Yu said she would have to remind the teacher to use her English name.
“And I say, ‘Oh, it’s me, and I’m called Judy’. I was doing that a lot for the benefit of other people,” she said.
However Yu is unsure if she would have preferred using her Mandarin name, due to her last name Hung sharing the same spelling as a slang reference in English to genitalia.
“… I get a lot of phallic jokes,” Yu said.
“I don’t know if my childhood would have been very different if I had stuck with Yu Hung.”
‘Thought that life would be so much easier’
Juna Xu’s grandfather created her first name from a Chinese character, and like Yu, she was teased for the phonetic similarity between unrelated English words and her full name.
“So that can translate to ‘tuna zoo’, or smelly fish living at a zoo,” Juna told Insight.
“When these things are said to you over and over again, it really chipped away at my confidence.”
Juna, 30, wanted to work in the media industry, particularly broadcast journalism, but felt discouraged seeing mostly Anglo people with non-Asian names on TV when she was a young girl.
“And so, the hopes of ever achieving that dream … just seemed like a far cry,” she said.
Juna says she thought having a different name would make her life much easier.
“Being Asian and having a name that everyone made fun of just made me feel really different to everyone,” she said.
“I would spend nights lying awake thinking about how I was going to change my name to Jane, or my middle name Jessica.”
Pronounced discrimination in recruitment
Juna’s concern about the link between her name and job opportunities is not unfounded.
A 2023 Monash University study of 12,000 job applications found that applicants with non-English-sounding names were less likely to receive an interview than candidates with English names.
Candidates with non-English-sounding names received 45 per cent fewer callbacks, and this increased to 57 per cent for leadership positions.
“The findings provide support for the existence of pronounced discrimination in the recruitment of leadership positions,” study co-author and Monash University economics professor Andreas Liebbrandt said.
Leibbrandt, whose research focuses on the economic science of diversity and inclusion, said that given the study’s results, it’s not surprising some people change or anglicise their names when migrating to Australia.
“…. It’s common for [people from Chinese ethnicities] to use a Western first name in order to avoid discrimination,” he said.
Leibbrandt was also involved with a study published in 2024 that was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when there were a lot fewer jobs available and being advertised.
He said the study observed: “that during the pandemic, this difference between ethnic and ‘white’ names almost completely vanishes in terms of callback rates”.
The professor was surprised by the results that found having a culturally diverse name was no longer a hurdle to getting a callback for a leadership position in Australia during the pandemic.
“… We relate this to the ‘glass cliff’ theory, where in uncertain economic times, organisations are much more willing to risk who they employ and are much more willing to switch things up a little bit — and that these two motivations correlate with ethnicity.”
‘Insisting that I be seen for who I am’
Similarly to Yu, Minoli Wijetunga, whose full name is Liyanamohottilage Minoli Sakunika Wijetunga, has experienced difficulties because of her name, but has never changed it.
“I’m Sinhalese, and in my culture a lot of people have a lineage name at the beginning and a family name at the end,” she said.
Born in Sri Lanka, she says that having a name that doesn’t follow a Western naming convention has required her to develop workarounds, as it is often too long for official forms and databases.
“My GP has a note saying for all Medicare purposes, just issue the invoice to me, and I’ll make the claim myself,” Minoli said.
“It’s a lot of … putting thought into processes and always knowing that ‘oh, this is going to be a thing, and I need to prepare for it’.”
Minoli has felt that people from Western countries sometimes romanticise her lineage name when they read it and it’s often mistaken for a first name.
“They will try to say Liyanamohottilage and if they make a mistake, I would say: ‘Oh, it’s fine, you can say Minoli, you can call me Minoli. That’s my name.’”
She says people still insist that she teach them how to pronounce it, and that they would say it sounded musical or pretty.
“It just feels weird; a whole production when I just want you to call me by the name I want you to call me in Australia.”
Despite the inconveniences, Minoli says she wouldn’t change her name.
“Understanding the histories and trajectories behind what we consider as the norm, I don’t think I would feel true to myself if I were to change my name,” she said.
“Keeping my whole name is my way of insisting that I be seen for who I am …”
An unlikely networking tool
For Juna, she turned people’s misspellings of her name into a professional networking opportunity.
After becoming a digital journalist, she continued to receive emails addressed to “June, Juno, Junie…” and would post screenshots of the mistakes to her Instagram story.
“It became kind of my personal brand that the media industry would associate me with,” Juna said.
“I wouldn’t have been able to make all these connections in the media industry if it wasn’t because of a weird name.”
Juna says she has grown to love her name and, with the meaning “emperor’s stamp made out of jade” her grandfather ascribed to it, sees it as paying respect to her immigrant parents.
“All of this hardship and sacrifice they’ve had to make to bring me up is what my name symbolises to me … And I wouldn’t trade it for any other name in the world.”
‘I don’t prefer that name’
Similarly to Juna, Yu eventually decided to embrace her birth name and stopped going by Judy when she started university, too tired of constantly explaining why her birth name was different.
“I just thought it was just easier in my life to go by Yu. Yu is something that I can defend because this person exists,” she said.
“That’s legally who I am on paper, on my passport, on my bank cards.”
Yu now believes she shouldn’t have to change her name to make it easier for others.
“Whether that is bureaucracy — going through the legal system and adding a name — or having to always ask people to call me by a different preferred name,” Yu said.
“At the end of the day, I don’t prefer that name. You prefer that name because you can’t pronounce my name.”
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