Except that it's actually “Yu Wanna Wen, Sarah?”. Pat, my tennis coach, said this during a tennis lesson when he found out my older brother’s name Yu (pronounced like you), my dad’s name Wen, and my younger sister’s name Wanna. Everyone in my family has had their Chinese pinyin as their first names except for me. I was the first and only in the family to have an American first name. Both my siblings had their Chinese name Pinyin (spelling of the characters) as their first name but I was unique with having Sarah as mine. To most people, Sarah may feel boring and plain but to my family it holds weight and it makes me stand out.

Along with being the only one with an American first name in the family, I was also the only one with a middle name, Xue-Rou. Xue-Rou is the pinyin spelling of my Chinese name and it is 雪柔 in Chinese. I was grateful for having a middle name because it reserved my Chinese name within my legal name while avoiding having my name mispronounced by others with it being in the middle of my name instead of the beginning like others may have. 

While being grateful for having such a name I also disliked it sometimes, especially the nickname aspect of my first name. There would always be people with nicknames but for the name “Sarah” there was no nickname. Every Sarah or Sara that I have met never had a nickname for the name. Another thing that I did not like about my name was how people called my Chinese name. My name is 林雪柔 or “Lin Xue Rou” in pinyin and in Chinese when you have three characters in your name people would call you by the last two leaving out the first character because it has the same meaning as a last name in English. I was always called by all three characters whenever my parents called my name. Which made me feel like something serious is happening or I am in trouble when they call my name and made me dislike being called my Chinese name with all three characters.

In the year 2005 the name “Sarah” had a ranking of 15 at the time but ended up dropping to 94 in 2022. I was happy to see the numbers drop because even though growing up I didn’t have much of a problem with having the same name as other “Sarah”s or “Sara”s, I was very aware that Sarah was a common name. Although in high school I only had one “Sara” that would be in the same class as me, in college I already knew two other “Sarah”s. Knowing two was better than the 10 “Jack”s or 9 “Daniel”s that you would meet from all over campus so I guess “Sarah” isn’t that common after all.

Works Cited 

“Popular Baby Names.” Ssa.gov, 2018, www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/.