Say My Name Right: Vietnamese-Americans Are Done Shrinking Themselves to Fit

Nguyễn Thị Hương had gone by "Jenny" since third grade. It wasn't her idea. Her teacher suggested it the first week of school, and her parents — eager for her to fit in, desperate for her not to stand out in the wrong ways — agreed. Jenny stuck. For twenty-two years, Jenny stuck.

Then, at 30, she introduced herself at a company meeting as Hương.

"I said it clearly. I didn't apologize for it. I didn't offer a nickname," she says. "And something shifted in me that I didn't even know was misaligned."

Hương's story isn't unusual. Across Vietnamese-American communities — in Houston, in Orange County, in the suburbs of Northern Virginia — a quiet but meaningful movement is taking shape. People are returning to their birth names. Others who never abandoned them are insisting, more firmly than before, that those names be used correctly. The shift is small in gesture and enormous in meaning.

A Name Given, A Name Taken

The practice of adopting an Americanized name has deep roots in the immigrant experience broadly, and in the Vietnamese-American story specifically. When families arrived after 1975, and in the decades that followed, assimilation was often framed as survival strategy. A name that Americans could pronounce without stumbling was one fewer obstacle. One fewer moment of awkward silence. One fewer reason to stand out.

Teachers sometimes assigned nicknames without asking. Employers subtly favored applicants whose names felt familiar. Parents, wanting ease for their children, sometimes preemptively chose English names at birth. The cumulative effect was a generation — and then another — of Vietnamese-Americans moving through the world under names that had nothing to do with who they were.

"My parents named me Phúc. It means happiness, good fortune — it's a beautiful name," says Phúc Lâm, 27, a graphic designer in Los Angeles. "But I grew up as 'Felix' because my parents were worried about how kids would say it. I understood why. And I also spent my whole childhood feeling like Felix was a costume I was wearing."

For Phúc, dropping the nickname in his mid-twenties wasn't a dramatic announcement. It was a gradual shift — LinkedIn first, then introductions at networking events, then with new colleagues. Each small reclamation felt like loosening something that had been cinched too tight.

The Psychology of Being Named

Names are not neutral. Psychologists who study identity formation consistently find that the name a person uses — and how others respond to it — plays a significant role in self-concept and sense of belonging. For children of immigrants, the pressure to adopt a "simpler" name can send a message that gets internalized early: the version of you that's easiest for others is the version most welcome here.

Dr. Thanh Võ, a cultural psychologist at UC Irvine who studies identity in Vietnamese-American populations, describes this as a form of what she calls "low-friction assimilation."

"The name becomes a proxy for a larger question: how much of yourself do you have to make invisible to be accepted?" she says. "When someone reclaims their birth name, they're often answering that question differently than they were taught to. They're saying: not this much. Not anymore."

That shift tends to happen in early adulthood, Dr. Võ notes — often when a person is establishing their professional identity for the first time and has enough agency to make choices their parents couldn't afford to make.

The Weight of Professional Spaces

For many Vietnamese-Americans, the workplace is where name reclamation gets most complicated. The fear that a Vietnamese name will result in a resume being passed over is not irrational — research on hiring discrimination based on name-based ethnic signaling is well-documented in the U.S. The calculus of "do I use my real name or the one that gets callbacks" is one that many people of color navigate with exhausting regularity.

And yet, more and more Vietnamese-Americans are deciding the cost of the workaround is too high.

"I was 'Kevin' for the first three years at my job," says Khải Đinh, 31, a software engineer in Seattle. "Then one day I just... updated my Slack profile. Changed my email signature. Told my manager. I was terrified. And literally nothing bad happened. People just started calling me Khải. Some of them actually asked me how to say it correctly, which felt like the nicest thing."

Khải's experience points to something shifting in American workplace culture — a growing (if uneven) awareness that asking someone to modify their name for your comfort is not a neutral request. The discourse around belonging and inclusion in corporate America has, slowly, made more room for names that don't sound like they came from a suburb of Columbus.

What's in the Name, Exactly

Vietnamese names carry layers that English nicknames simply cannot hold. They often encode family lineage, birth order, aspirations, or poetic meaning. A name like Ngọc (jade, precious), Hải (ocean), or Minh (bright, intelligent) is a small piece of a larger story about where a person comes from and what their family hoped for them.

When that name gets replaced with "Nancy" or "Michael," something specific is lost — not just aesthetically, but genealogically. The thread connecting a person to their family's language and history gets a little thinner.

"My Vietnamese name is the only part of my name that connects me to my grandparents," says Bảo Nguyễn, 25, a nursing student in Philadelphia. "My English nickname doesn't mean anything. My Vietnamese name means 'precious' and my grandmother chose it. Why would I give that up?"

The Conversation Keeps Expanding

What's notable about this movement is that it's happening across generations and in both directions. Some second-generation Vietnamese-Americans, who grew up entirely with English names, are researching what they would have been called and incorporating those names into their adult identities. Others who kept their Vietnamese names are pushing harder for correct pronunciation — no longer offering the "you can just call me..." escape hatch.

And some parents of the current generation are making different choices than their own parents did — giving their children Vietnamese names and preparing them with the confidence to use them fully.

"I named my daughter Trúc," says Minh Hà, 38, a mother in Dallas. "And I told her from the beginning: this is your name. It's beautiful. Don't let anyone shorten it."

Hương — formerly Jenny — is still going by Hương at work. Some colleagues still stumble over it. She no longer offers them the easier version.

"My name is two syllables," she says with a small laugh. "People manage 'Schwarzenegger.' They can manage Hương."