고등학교 공통영어2 (NE능률 민병천) 연계 글

Anyone with an unusual name knows the brief pause before a teacher reads it aloud on the first day of school. Until this spring, I avoided that pause by revealing only half of my name. At school, I was Hyerim, a name that any teacher in Korea could pronounce easily. At home, however, I was Paloma to Mom, who grew up in Mexico and learned Korean in her twenties. Dad called me Hyerim. He had learned Spanish after meeting Mom and still wrote it in careful capital letters, like a pupil copying from a board.

In middle school, a substitute teacher found "Paloma" on an old form and tried three ways to say it before giving up. For a week afterward, some boys mocked me by calling me "Pajama," so I decided to conceal that name at school.

This March, I started at a high school where nobody knew either of my names. On the first day, our homeroom teacher handed out cards with a single line: "The name you would like us to call you." My new classmates filled in the line in seconds. I wrote one initial, erased it, wrote the other, and erased that too. In the end, I folded the blank card and took it home.

That evening, I asked Mom why she and Dad had not simply given me one name. Instead of answering, she opened my baby book to the first page. Under the word "Name," there was only one line, and two names shared it. "PALOMA" stood in careful capital letters, and my Korean name sat beside it in round, slightly uneven strokes. "We wrote them on the same afternoon," Mom said. "Nobody asked you to choose then, so why should you choose now?"

Early the next day, I wrote both names on the card, one after the other. When our teacher read the cards aloud, he paused at mine, and I waited for the old laughter. Instead, he asked me to say each name once and then repeated both perfectly. For years, I had let only one of my names come to school. Now they share one line, just as they do in my baby book, and I answer to both.