For most of my life, I hated my name. Before I was born, my parents, who had come to the United States from China a few years before, had chosen to call me Elaine, but my mom’s sole white friend at the time told her that it was an old-lady name. She suggested Alyssa instead.

My dad didn’t know how to spell that, so when the time came to register me, he sounded it out, figured “Alyssa” sounded like “eleven,” threw in a couple of S’s for good measure, and there I was, hours old and legally bound to this strange portmanteau, Elessa.

I still ended up going by Elaine, perhaps because my parents wanted me to use my Chinese name, Yilan.