.what's in a name.

no matter what, there doesn't seem to be a way around labels...we seemed destined to continually categorize and name things. from the time we are born, we are taught...dare i say, urged...to call things by their names. *digression: a favorite family story my mom and her sisters like to tell to one another is about all the tricks my mom taught me when i was just a toddler. there were quite a few, but apparently the most impressive was when my mom would ask me something like, "pauline, where's your hand?" and i would open and close my hand in the air...and we would continue in that fashion until i had correctly identified my eyes, nose, ears, mouth, head, etc. ...and the point of this anecdote being a demonstration of how we're constantly taught to name things x)

juliet's famous line about names might have been really dreamy and romantic, but let's face it...everything is in a name, especially those attached to people. your name becomes a symbol of who you are...upon hearing it, those who know you--intimately or not--can't help but conjure some image of you. .accurate or not. and it's not just your personal name, the name your parents gave you....other labels serve as names too--filipino, liberal, poor, professional, jewish, gay, immigrant................gangsta xP


so it doesn't surprise me that gogol chooses to change his name after high school...to detach himself from a name that he feels is unrepresentative of his own self-image. but i think the frustration that motivates gogol's name change stems from his intentional refusal to embrace certain facets of his own identity. gogol self-righteously rejects his parents' immigrant heritage. he doesn't seem to take any interest in his own roots--where his parents came from, their native tradition....i think that if he had taken the time to really engage himself with these things, and with his parents especially, he wouldn't have felt such resentment.

i feel for gogol...it's hard being first generation...*a note: the debate wears on over whether (a) the immigrant generation is considered first and their american-born children considered second....or if (b) the immigrant generation goes by that moniker, thusly making their children first generation *sigh* i suppose another problem with names is their not-so-occasional ambiguity...but i personally see the latter method as making more sense since children of immigrants are really the first generation to be born into american nationality. i myself am a child of immigrants....and the first child as well. it made me smile to see a pattern in gogol's life that was familiar...gogol's childhood and mine ran parallel, the space separating our life lines only being that he was smothered under bengali tradition, while i suffered repression under filipino tradition...my household was straight outta the Pilipinas circa 1970s. it took many years and some good ol' teenage rebellion on my part to catalyze the evolution of my parents' outlook. .paving the way for my li'l bro to have a relatively free high school experience...tsk tsk...the young ones get all the spoils of the eldest child's parental war. but while i resented their radical conservatism when it came to regulating my social interactions, .meaning, i wasn't allowed to sleep over at friends' houses, be upstairs with a boy....be out after dark. i didn't resent the fact that my parents held on tightly to filipino cultural traditions of respecting elders, family dinners, extended family gatherings, speaking tagalog. i was glad about it because i had something that simultaneously set me apart from the predominantly white crowd at school AND linked me to people who shared the same motherland values.

my best friends in the whole world are the children of my dad's fraternity brothers from medical school....i have never lived in the same city as any of them, we're scattered throughout cali, tejas, oHIo, and NY....but we've always been uber-close, since our childhoods are built on the same foundations and have similar frameworks. only the details differ...but the themes are all there....and it always amazes me how despite our different environments and influences, our parents' origins are rooted deeply enough in us to produce a group that shares a similar vision of how those traditions will be carried on, but at the same time adapted....so that our children .second generation x) . can feel the pride, without the oppression of being called filipino.