Hello, person who is reading my blog!

As it is my first blog post, I believe that it is important to introduce myself before we get any further. 

My name is Alexandra Kim. But most people call me Alex.

The only person who calls me Alexandra is my mom. So yes, just Alex to everyone else.

I have a middle name too, but like my first name, only certain people call me that. This is due to the fact that it’s my Korean name, Hejin. For all you Koreans out there reading this blog post, YES, my mom is bad at spelling and spelled my name wrong on my birth certificate. I guess the 혜 in 혜진 didn’t translate to a “hye” when translating to English.

Anyways, yes, my middle name is Hejin. 

How you would pronounce that is Heh-jin.

The only people who call me that, or who I let call me that, are my Korean relatives and myself (we’ll get to this in a future blog). 

The reason being is that I HATE when people attempt to pronounce my middle name. 

I would say this is due to childhood trauma...

When I was a mere fifth grader, people would ask what each others’ full names were - we thought we were sophisticated, calling people by their full names. We would go down the line - John, Katherine, Elizabeth, the random cool mother’s maiden name Abbott, etc. Finally, they would ask me:

“Okay, Alex, what’s your middle name?”

“Hejin”

“What?”

“Heh” (pause) “Jin”

“Is that Asian?”

“I mean, it’s Korean, but sure.”

“Haha! Sounds like PIGEON!”

Suddenly everyone around me started chanting “ALEX PIGEON KIM” over and over. It’s funny now that I think back on it, but geez when I was a kid… Scarring.

From then on, I HATED my Korean  Asian name.

Now, as a senior in college, I will say that I have YET to move on from this weird feeling of embarrassment whenever someone pronounces my middle name. There have been SO many instances of professors calling roll and asking if there’s a “He (like the pronoun) Jin present.”

Classmates would turn to me and snicker as I would raise my hand to tell the professor I was there. 

Another reason why I don’t enjoy my middle name is because of the occupational field I have chosen to pursue. The Hussman School of Journalism and Media teaches students to try to secure a portfolio website in order to display all our craft.

The only problem is my name: Alex Kim. 

If you type that into Google, it has 285,000,000 hits. If you type in alexkim.com, it directs you to a criminal defense lawyer, which is great for him, but quite inconvenient for me. 

When I had totally given up on a domain name (the URL you type into the search bar), Gary, my professor who is having me write these blogs (Gary, if you’re reading this, wassup), suggested I include my middle name in my website URL.

Of course, to the average person, including your middle name wouldn’t be THAT big of a deal. Yeah, if my name were Alex Elizabeth Kim, I would have no qualms. But due to my tortured past, I CANNOT bring myself to rebrand as Alex Hejin Kim.

No. Gary, I know you think I’m silly for doing this, but DAMN IT. America has shaped me into a person who wants to assimilate into American culture. And it has taught me to try to erase my Korean heritage and to only go by names that don’t draw too much attention.

So can’t I just not worry about the randos visiting my portfolio site reading my name and potentially likening it to the word “pigeon?”

Sorry for the rant. But yes. I hope this was a good enough introduction for you.

Hello, my name is Alex Kim. Welcome to my blog about my Korean American experience.