Day 263: Meredith—and Other White Girl Names

If you’re reading this, I fear you may have the wrong impression of me. 

If you know me only as Meredith, you may be picturing some late-millennial white woman, perky, blonde, or maybe one of the varieties thereof: sandy blonde, dirty blonde, bottle blonde, strawberry blonde. Why are there so many adjectives to describe white women’s hair? Wait, don’t answer that. I already know. 

Anyway, you may be picturing a peloton-riding, professional ladder-climber who routinely flirts with a white savior complex. 

I am definitely not a Meredith. 

I am also not a Mere, a Mer, a Meri, or worse yet, a Mere-Mere (though I was unfortunately referred to as such during a number of high school years). 

Throughout my life, I have felt most comfortable in spaces and places where people call me by my last name: Buse. 

This legacy, passed down from my quadriplegic father, his experience of hardship due to his disability and the struggle and independence he derived from it, feels more comfortable for me–or at least more familiar. 

But Meredith? What kind of legacy did my adoptive parents intend for me there? 

A name with Welsh origins, Meredith was one of those inexplicable fad names whose popularity peaked in the early 80s. Perhaps, my adoptive parents chose it for its musicality, or because they liked its meaning: “great lord.” 

Good lord. 

In any case, they chose it without context or consideration for what I, a Korean girl, would experience walking through life with a white-girl name, as well as a white-girl family, white parents, and white-girl standards of beauty imposed on me at every turn. 

So now, even if I reject my white-girl heritage (of which I have little, as I am first-generation to that country of privilege. . . or less) I remain unsure what to replace it with. 

If I no longer claim Meredith and all that it implies, what can I rightfully claim? 

By giving me a white-girl name, my adoptive parents clearly articulated what they wanted, hoped and expected for my life–that I would turn into a white girl, or at least really look like one on paper. 

They ignored the quite obvious physical constraints and certainly the psychological and emotional toll of me trying to be something I am not. They disregarded the dissonance I would constantly face in attempting to embody someone else’s identity, someone else’s name, of seeking to conform and assimilate on the deepest levels of myself. 

They did this unthinkingly, unknowingly and without malice. Such is the power of whiteness: it erases everything in and around its path without giving a crap. 

Now, after more than 30 years of being a misnomer, I am beginning to build myself up in a different image. Filling in the outlines and bringing myself into relief–not a model minority blending into a white background, not someone white-adjacent, close enough to whiteness to almost touch it—but something entirely else. 

I have started using my full name, including my middle name, which is the only thing I have left from my birth parents: Meredith Seung Mee Buse. 

For 37 years, I never used my full name because I did not feel comfortable claiming it. I didn’t feel I had a right to be Korean, to call myself Korean, to identify as Korean. 

But here’s the secret–Suprise!–I have been Korean the whole time. 

In retrospect, my ambivalence toward using my full name, my concern that it was an appeal to racial diversity, an attempt to tip the scales in my direction seems amusing. Like the reality of my race was some hidden factor, some unknown, when anyone who has seen my face clearly knows and has already identified me as Not White. 

While operating under the purview of the white gaze, I and everyone else knew I could never actually be white–but wasn’t it so cute how I tried? 

Being Asian conferred on me certain advantages: a model minority status that meant I was close enough for people to consider me white. I was white enough. As long as I did well in school, and played nicely with the other children, I was socially acceptable. As long as I never got upset, never acted disobediently, never achieved anything less than perfection, never failed, I accessed enough privilege to keep from considering the ways whiteness oppressed me. 

Now, for the first time in my life, I am not being outed incidentally by the features of my face and the color of my skin, but coming out actively and affirmatively. 

It feels both terrifying and liberating to be coming out this way. What will it mean for me? Who will find out?

I am coming out as a not-white person. 

Coming out as an adoptee. 

However, perhaps the most terrifying part is that I am coming out as something else, too. 

Something subversive, something potentially dangerous, someone my white family may or may not be able to love: A person who has stopped trying to be white. 

I am coming out as someone who has stopped aspiring to whiteness, stopped believing it is something worth aspiring to.  

Someone who no longer needs validation, verification, or a “certification of authenticity” from a white authority to simply exist. 

Here, outside of the white gaze, I find a space I never knew existed. A space where I can breathe. And there are others here, too: teachers, students and friends.  

Here, I realize I have always been Seung Mee. 

My heritage, my given name has been waiting patiently for me, right at the center of my identity. 

There in the middle, at my core, surrounded by my adoptive mother’s influence (Meredith) and flanked by my adoptive dad’s example (Buse). 

I feared that, in moving my given name to my middle name, my adoptive parents had subjugated this part of me. But now I see that they only made it more central to who I am. 

Underneath my initials S. and M. lives a whole other self: hiding, abbreviated, unexplored. Buried like a seed in spring, waiting to be warmed and watered, biding its time for a perfect chance to bloom. 

—-----------

In reclaiming my name, there is, of course, the matter of pronunciation. I confess to having no idea how to pronounce my own name. 

Sure, I googled it. 

But even hearing it pronounced by sample speakers from various countries–with extra authenticity given to Koreans pronouncing my Korean name–does not change the fact that I have only ever heard white people say my name: sometimes “Sung” like what one does with one’s voice to music, sometimes “Sue-ng” which sounds like moon but ends with a “g”.   

Even after hearing it on the computer, I remain unconvinced that my ears are hearing the vowels correctly or that my mouth can really make the sounds. 

So, if asked by a white person to say my own name, I will give my best guess. And if asked by a fellow Korean, I will ask them for help with pronunciation. Such are the perils of representation in our multicultural world. 

I am reminded of a woman I read about online who was second generation Chinese-American. She described googling the phrase “Happy New Year” in Mandarin, practicing and then passing this piece of lost heritage off as her own. Because it is. 

Or my dear friend who grew up hearing but not speaking Spanish. When her employers continually placed her in Spanish-speaking positions, she taught herself Spanish and quick, so she could do her job. 

These stories help me lessen my sense of imposter syndrome. 

I come from a long, proud lineage of daughters who have had to go to extraordinary and sometimes uncomfortable lengths to access the heritage, traditions and ethnicity we are entitled to, that is our birthright. 

That was effaced by time and space and white supremacy. 

As such, I can embody and push myself to keep learning despite discomfort. 

And in the meantime, I guess I will practice saying my name in the mirror, whisper it to myself in bed at night and first thing in the morning, like a prayer: Seung Mee. Seung Mee. Seung Mee.