My Name is Yuping Zhu

A lifelong old debate that I’ve had with myself: should I persevere through the misspelled coffee cups and first day of class introductions for the sake of preserving one of the last remnants of my Asian-ness or finally save myself from one facet of racism at the price of erasing an 18-year old pillar of identity and self?

Image: Yuping Zhu

My name, Yuping Zhu, has always been a reminder of my heritage. In elementary and middle school, my classmates couldn’t say it or spell it; and when they stumbled across the simple syllables of “yu” (pronounced as “you”) and “ping”, my name turned into something along the lines of “you pee” or “you poo”. So every September of every year, I sat quietly, looking at the ground with a red face in our “community circle”, as everyone around me bellowed with laughter at my mispronounced name.

I had hoped that the cruel mispronunciations of my name would be something that I’d grow out of, just like my Hello Kitty sweatsuit that I wore every day to South Elementary School. But it felt like a mole, an ugly part of myself that no matter how hard I tried to cover up, was a permanent subject of ridicule.

I eventually grew tired of it all. The awkwardness when someone said my name wrong and I never corrected them, the instinct to immediately spell my name after introducing myself, the preparation for someone to ask “Am I pronouncing this correctly?” post introduction and post spelling, when others asked me where the emphasis syllable was: “is it YU-ping? Or is it yu-PING?” And I’d say “Neither”, and they’d just laugh at me, “it’s your name, how do you not know how to pronounce it?”. Well, I have a Chinese name so of course it won’t follow English conventions but I don’t expect you to understand…

I find that my frustrations and my hatred of my own name only grew with time, as I became an artist and a songwriter, where branding really matters. I constantly struggle with balancing the different needs of my personal self and artist self, and wonder if I could gain more traction if I had a name that people could remember, or even say. And thinking about what I need, as just a normal teenager going through typical normal teenager crises, I don’t want to feel like an alien, and I don’t want to feel misunderstood.

To this day, I still stand in the middle of both hating and loving my Chinese name as I live and grow in America. I hope to continue asking myself questions of identity and self as I proceed to develop as a person and an artist. Someone told me that these two identities that I’ve mentally separated are really the same thing: my artistry is a reflection of who I am, and I am a reflection of my artistry, and I think that is really interesting. To be continued…