THE CHOICE: FIT IN OR SHOW ETHNIC PRIDE?

“After my stories published, I was accosted online, with racist tweets and emails,” journalist Marian Chia-ming Liu wrote in The Washington Post Magazine in January. “To protect myself, I started wearing sunglasses in public often, to obscure my race.”

That is not all she did. Like so many immigrants — first, second, even third generation — she grappled with her heritage, caught between two cultures. She had learned Mandarin from the cradle, taking English-as-a-second language in school. Deciding which name to use — Chinese or an Anglicized version — was part of an awkward effort to adjust.

Then violence came. In 2020, hate crimes against Asian people jumped 73 percent; a Pew Research Center study in April 2021 found one-third of Asian Americans feared threats

Slayton is a professor of history at Chapman University. He lives in Tustin. or physical attacks.

Her first reaction was fear, carrying a personal alarm and running from confrontation.

But then she changed, deciding to step up, make a bold statement of pride, in the most blatant and dramatic form possible. Liu took a remarkable move, a gesture of strength: She accepted her Chinese name and made it official.

By so doing, by grappling with her identity, she became part of an historic movement; in fact, generations of Jewish people, Italian people, Polish people and others have dealt with the same issue.

Max Greenberger, for one, didn’t like his name. In 1932, he petitioned a court in New York City so that he and his children could shorten it to Greene. It was the kids’ fault: his daughter was a budding artist, and “the name Greenberger is a foreign sounding name and is not conducive to securing good employment as a musician.” His male off