New year, new xanga.

I've been Wei Lai all my life. No American I've ever met has managed to pronounce my name correctly on the first try. For the more patient substitute teachers, it's a timid stammer, "...Lay? Wee? Lay Wee, is that right?" For the impatient kind, it's a long pause, and then, "last name W-E-I."

I remember one substitute who was especially determined to master the pronounciation of my name. "So how do you say it?" he asked. I had long before given up trying to teach people to say my name correctly; instead, I just gave them a free reign and answered to whatever sounded remotely close to my name. "It doesn't matter," I said.

He looked horrified. "Of course it does!" he insisted, and I grudgingly repeated for what seemed like the thousandth time since I moved to America, "Lie - way. " Actually, that's not really how you say it, but it's the closest thing in English. I wasn't about to explain the four accents and the little throat movements that were unique to Mandarin Chinese to a bewildered substitute teacher.

Before I moved to the U.S., I thought long and hard about giving myself an English name. It wouldn't be one of those boring names from English textbooks - "Jane and Anna play ball. Mary goes to Susan's house." It would have to be something nice and poetic, something that captured my personality. I wrote out long lists of names and pored over them. Elizabeth was royal, Laurestine quaint, and Kaylene sparkling. They were all so good that I couldn't choose just one. So I decided to wait.

The summer I spent in Athens, Georgia before school opened was wild, exciting and blissful. I knelt down in the grass to retrieve a lost badminton ball and rose to discover ants swarming on my knees, hailing from an ant hill that had been obscured by the long grass. I saw night laser shows at Stone Mountain and played scrabble with magnetic letters on a refrigerator. I trod through crinkling leaves in the woods and listened as my friends brainstormed names. "It has to be something close to your Chinese name, of course," they said, "otherwise you won't recognize it when people call you." I remembered a friend in China who called herself Christina. When she received calls at her company from people asking for "Christina", she would say, "there isn't anyone here named Christina", and hang up the phone. Then she would realize that she had forgotten her own name - again.

On the first day of school, I arrived at the fifth-grade classroom, ready with books, pencils, and a great English name. "Willa," I told my homeroom teacher. "After Willa Ford." I had no idea who Willa Ford was, but my friends assured me that she was a great actress. The teacher was a tall lady with a great passion for exotic things. She had climbed the Great Wall of China years ago and kept spiders and snakes. "Oh no, I can't allow you to have an English name," she said. "Why call yourself Willa when you have such a beautiful Chinese name? I'm going to call you Wei Lai."

So Wei Lai it was. The social-studies teachers next door called me "Wei-Lee", but he was so intimidating that I never dared to correct him. Sixth grade came, and middle school teachers assumed that since I had a foreign name, I must not have been able to speak English. I was put in the same reading class with a bunch of closely-knit Hispanic kids who stared at me as though I were an alien. The teacher was Hispanic as well, and I couldn't understand his accent. I cried on the shoulder of a friendly classmate (she couldn't pronounce my name, either), complaining that I could speak English just as well as anyone else could, and that it was an insult to be placed in an ESOL class again. Soon, I was moved up a teensy bit; I now sat in a classroom of kids who still read by tracing their letters across the page and forming the words with their mouths. I could read pretty well at the point, already devouring an unabridged copy of The Three Musketeers at ten years old. But no one believed that I was good enough for an advanced English class.

I wanted to change my name then, but everyone already knew me as Wei Lai, so I filed away the list of names I wanted for further use. We were going to move again soon, at the end of seventh grade, and this time I'd be able to use a new name. I wanted to call myself Maggie, or maybe Lindsay; I sometimes used those names to fend off junk mail. Lily was good, and so was Emily. I'd be able to use any of them at my leisure now. I could throw away my old identity - Wei Lai the quiet Chinese girl - and get a new one. Confident Maggie. Outgoing Lindsay. I could finally be a normal person for once.

I walked into my new school, feeling confident and outgoing. I was a new person now. Perhaps I wasn't blonde and blue-eyed on the outside, but I could still be normal with an English name, right?

A friendly classmate turned to me. "What's your name?" she asked.

I froze. Maggie. Lindsay. Lily. Just pick one.

"Wei Lai," I said. "My name is Wei Lai."

So I saw this thread on collegeconfidential.com about naming your kid for academic success. According to NEWSWEEK, students whose first names start with A or B are more likely to do well in school than students whose names start with C or D. That seems like complete nonsense to me, but....

Then the posters started talking about how their last names affected their school careers. One person says:

"My maiden name started with a Z. I suffered all my academic life from being last on the list, the last to take any oral examination when the profs were fed up and exhausted. I made a great stride forward by marrying Mr W. My kids have suffered as much as I did, and have often told me that given my past, it was a premeditated crime designed to make their scolastic life a nightmare, and how tough would it have been to come up with Adrian Aardvark as a hubby?"

Another person says:

"My maiden name started with A, and that meant: I sat in the front of the class, had to give oral book reports first, and got called on more frequently than others.
As an incredibly shy kid, this was torture for me at the time, but looking back, it forced me to speak up when I never would have volunteered myself."

I've always resented having a last name near the end of the alphabet. I always have to sit in the back of the classroom (next to the teacher's desk, which is very unpleasant), and I always get called on last. I wish they would rearrange the alphabet and make W the first letter. Hahahahaha.

I wish I was Cantonese. Then I could change my last name to Ngai.

That's one major difference between Cantonese/Taiwanese people and Mandarin-speaking mainlanders. It's the same last name, but spelled different ways. Zhang in Mandarin is spelled Chang in Taiwanese and Cheung in Hong Kong pin-yin. Zhao and Zhou are turned into Chow and Chou. Xie is turned into Hsieh. Ouyang is turned into Au-Yeung. Wu is turned into Ng. Zheng is turned into Jen.

Man....those people really know how to get ahead in life.....