My wife got a new last name nearly a month ago. And this week we filed the immigration papers in which she used that name for the first time. That meant she had to decide how she would sign her new name, which has been a fascinating process to watch.
Last night she stayed up later than usual filling up several sheets of paper with dozens of trial signatures. I told her she could sign her new name any way she wanted, as long as she could make it look pretty much the same every time she did it. She tried out a single capital letter for her last name and later, a single capital letter for her first name. I talked her out of those choices on the basis that they would be too easy to forge.
Some Nostalgia
I can faintly recall the excitement of learning how to write my name for the first time. I think it was my brother who showed me how to do it. Seeing it in writing seemed to confirm my existence, maybe even suggested some importance. I wasn't just me anymore, I was Ronny, or was it Ronnie? Now I'm not even sure which it was. By 5th or 6th grade my nickname had mostly become Tigger and in junior high school, Ron became my official name in the classroom. When I went off to college, I decided to leave Tigger at home with my high school buddies. I never acquired any new names after that.
Maybe I should have kept Tigger, as college got incredibly serious at times. There were days when I could have used a reminder of the possibility of being a bouncy orange tiger. Not that I ever felt trapped in a Winnie the Pooh life, because, thanks to my buddies at school and in the neighborhood, the name had mostly morphed into Tig, Teeg, Teeger, and Teegs. It was no longer the copy of a name created by a famous writer. Instead it had become the creation of my friends, in my own generation and neighborhood. It had character and always seemed to be said with affection, sometimes enthusiastically so. "Teegs!!!" coming from across the room whenever I entered my friend John's house always made me smile and feel a little special. I had never heard of any other Teegs, or Teegers, then or since.
I was the only one!
"Snap out of it! What happened with your wife?"
Ohhh! After working on it last night and then again this morning, my wife developed a really nice signature. She used it to sign all the immigration papers this afternoon. Her first name has remained the same given name she's had all of her life. She's always signed that with a version of Thai script, but quicker and not as formal looking as carefully printing out the full name in Thai script. She has kept that part in her new signature, as her first name, and she leaves out her middle name (her former maiden name) in her signature. She's never had a middle name before, so that's something new for her too.
She writes her new last name in Roman script, which is very appropriate, as the name stems from the Roman (Latin) word for camp. But she doesn't write it out carefully, like a practice session in the Palmer Method. The first two letters are recognizeable as such, but then the middle section is some squiggles, with an ending shape that looks like the letter R being crossed like a letter T. It's a nice artistic shortening of the correct spelling of the last name. The result is that her signature now contains her own variation on the Thai Script for her first name, followed by her own variation on the Roman script for her last name. The first is from the East, where she grew up and the last is from the West, where we now live. It is truly Two Worlds in One!
After she finished signing all the official papers, she went to work on her English nickname. I've already told the story of how she came to accept that name, which I gave her. Since we arrived in the US, she's had people calling her Paula, and I think she's gotten used to it. But as I discovered today, she didn't know how to spell it, just like I'm not sure how to spell Teeg. Her first four or five guesses were wrong. So then I spelled it for her, as she wrote it down.
Then she recorded all this information in her notebook, first with all four of her names printed clearly from left to right in Roman characters, then in Thai script in the row below that, and finally written below that in the way she now signs those names. She was fully engaged and seemed to be having a lot of fun with the learning process thoughout. It was exciting for me to watch it too!
Text :copyright: 2014-15 by Ron Chester
10 March 2015