Skip to content by Susie Ling 林修涵. Posted on 19 May 2026.
虎死留皮，人死留名
“Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.”
I was given a unique name at birth. In my Lin 林 family from Fuzhou, we keep a genealogy book, a jiapu 家谱, listing some 47 generations. Yes, my older sister is the first known woman in this book. Each of the generations inherits a generation name; ours is “xiu” 修. My grandfather then selected my given name of “han” 涵. Like my sisters, it has a water radical to balance the wood radical of our clan name…
None of this is valued or even makes sense in America. There was no way to translate Lin Xiuhan into anything meaningful when I immigrated.
As a girl born in the 1950s, my American name became “Susie Ling” – so non-unique. You can’t believe how many Susan, Sue, and Susie I personally know – also born in the 1950s and also of Chinese descent.
At an Asian American studies conference once, I was standing with filmmaker Loni Ding and Dr. Tim Dong. Yes, Ding and Ling with Dong.
At least, I am not either from the 王 or 黄 clans – as their names got all mushed together as Wong/Wang/Huang/etc. AI says that worldwide, there are 100 million 王 (meaning king) and 33 million 黄 (meaning yellow). To add insult to injury, most mispronounce Wang – and makes it sound like “Tang”, the orange drink.
My friend is a Hu 胡, a homonym of “who”. Except with other Mandarin speakers, she is forced to say, “My name is Hugh” because in America, you can’t say “My name is Hu.” Would you believe that my mom came from the Ma 馬 (meaning horse) clan? That is, my mama is a Ma.
Oh absolutely, Americana has degraded Vietnamese names, Slavic names, Scandinavian names, Armenian names, Arabic names, and even Spanish names. We have erased most African and Native names. This melting pot tends to give an American nasal intonation to just about every proper noun. Do Americans purposefully mispronounce “Iran” as “eye-ran” instead of “EE-ran”? Do we have speech impediments? Or more likely, listening impediments? Years ago, when I sat in the INS office waiting my turn, I listened to the officer mispronounce everything. How creative to mispronounce “Lopez” or “Tran”.
America insists that you have a “last name” – which in my case is really my first name. As many Burmese and other mononym cultures know, America absurdly insists that you have one “first” name and one “middle”name. At least in more recent times, we are more accepting of family members who don’t share the same “family” name. When I first got married, I created such confusion at our dentist office as they could not file two surnames who shared the same insurance policy.
My grandfather did not live long enough to know that I’ve barely had opportunity to use the name he so thoughtfully selected for me. How pained he would have been to hear my elementary classmates chant “Susie, the Ding-a-Ling”. These are the cultural “adaptations” that rob parts of our immigrant souls.
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Thanks for sharing the cultural roots of your name. I know my Chinese name held special significance for my father, who named all the Wong siblings, but I failed to understand how much he used history as a guide for our names. All I could do is do a little verbal ju-jitsu when I came up with the campaign slogan, “Vote Right, Vote Wong” when I ran for lower division chairman in junior high school. I won, but that was the end of my electoral career.