On Surnames - A Personal Essay By Olivia Rhee

When I was born, my parents used my birth certificate to seal my fate for me. In it, I’m branded Olivia Huffman Rhee. It’s not a double last name; there’s no hyphen. I was given my white father’s last name as my middle name, and I took my Korean mother’s last name as my own. Within the first moments of my life, I was deemed a blend of two cultures. 

For a while, I didn’t realize that I was an anomaly. Growing up in Washington, D.C., the people I surrounded myself with didn’t care about my last name at all. If anyone realized it belonged to my mother, they didn’t bring it up. If my multiracial identity made any sort of impression, I didn’t hear about it. In a city where diversity was so normalized, I was permitted to live a comfortable life, without feeling significantly different from any of my peers. 

When my family moved to Tennessee, I lost all anonymity. I became one of a handful of non-white students at an elementary school set on a cross-street named after a Confederate General. Never before had I experienced such homogeneity, and such blatant disdain for all forms of difference. There was nowhere for me to blend in. For the first time in my life, each aspect of my existence was suddenly subject to questioning and criticism. 

The first time I remember one of my classmates noticing my last name was during recess on the playground. When I mentioned in passing that I had my mother’s last name, rather than my father’s, the little boy next to me gave me a funny look. 

“Your dad didn’t want you?” he asked me in a sad voice. I didn’t know how to respond. And then he ran off to the swing set, and I sat still for a while, willing myself not to cry. 

It didn’t stop there. Whenever new friends came over for the first time, or when my dad came in for a parent-teacher conference, I was met with confusion. Nobody could seem to wrap their heads around the concept that this man with a different name and face could possibly make up a part of me. 

Around that time, I began attending a local Korean church, hoping I would feel the sense of community there that I lacked during the school day. Being there, though, was almost just as bad as being at school. To my white peers, I existed solely as Korean, but in the Korean community, I stuck out so prominently that I may as well have been fully white. 

Over those years, I attached so much heaviness to my last name. In my mind, it was so unmistakably Asian. It was unmistakably female. Most importantly, it was unmistakably foreign. These were the aspects of myself that I least wanted the world around me to see, and I had put forth so much effort to keep them hidden. But my last name was a constant reminder of who I was, and where I came from. 

During the most formative years of my childhood, no matter where I was, I constantly felt like an outsider. I began to feel such deep disdain for my parents, both for sticking me with my last name, and for allowing me to be born into a world that wasn’t made for me in the first place. I hated my mother for choosing to send me down a path of such ostracization, and I resented my father for going along with it. I convinced myself that my parents cared far more about their own interests than they did about my development as an individual. 

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my parents valued me more than anything. They valued me so much that they wanted to keep me irrevocably connected with my culture and identity. Regardless of my last name, I would live an unorthodox life. I was going to have to build a place for myself in the world, and as I did so, they wanted me to carry every aspect of my heritage with me. 

As I’ve grown older, self-recognition hasn’t become any easier. But with each new year of my life, as I’ve begun to settle into my identity, I’ve gained newfound appreciation for my last name. Rather than being a symbol of alienation, it’s become a symbol of my individuality. That’s something I’ve learned to celebrate. 

This past year, I took the time to thank my mother for giving me her last name. As usual, she reminded me that I should just stop doubting her, because she always knows better than me. While the jury’s still out on that point, I’m immensely grateful for the life that she and my father chose for me, unconventional as it may be.