My name is Youngkwan Ban. You can call me Ban.
You can call me like that because I chose to be. Perhaps I could insist you to name my full first name, Youngkwan. Maybe I can offer a hyphen between “Young” and “Kwan,” so non-Korean speakers could pronounce my name more like a Korean.
I could be just Young, using my first phoneme. This is a common solution to deal with long, tedious and unrememberable Korean names for many. Perhaps I could use Andrew, or Andre with a French nasal accent, that is my old baptismal name.
Naming yourself is your apparatus to reality. It interchanges, back and forth, yourself and the outside. But what if the outside denies calling me with my name? “Youngtwan (pause) Bao?” A staff in a coffee shop called me like this about two months ago. Before, I was Mr. Kwan. I was Yi. So now I surrender; I used to be YK (Yay-Kay) for many times I need to get dry-cleaning or restaurant reservations. You don’t know how an immigrant, whose mother tongue is not English or European, can be easily frustrated when we spell strange alphabets over the phone. Now I am good at this, “So my name is (pause) Yankee-Oscar-Uniform-November-Golf-Kilo-Whiskey-Alpha-November.”
Well, nevermind. It doesn’t matter who I am. Oh, by the way, this is my personal blog. And, call me any name, sound, or exclamation as you want.