What’s in a name? Turns out, a whole lot!
This blog was founded during the tumultuous year of 2020. As I’m writing this, we’re still in mid-July. But here are some 2020 highlights:

  • Covid19
  • onslaught of discrimination against Asians due to the virus outbreak occurring in Wuhan, China
  • George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement
  • the infamous “Karen” meme, an internet trend unfortunately personal to me

thoughts on “Karen”

When it came to naming my blog, I had a hard time deciding whether to include my first name. Even before the Karen trend became a thing, I’ve always thought “Karen” sounded like a middle-aged white woman. Funny story behind my name. My mom told me that she had wanted to name me Katie but my dad didn’t know how to spell it properly and must have written either Kathy or Katy. Apparently, the attending nurse wasn’t a fan of Kathy or Katy and refused to use it on my birth certificate. Out of frustration, my dad just flipped to the K baby names and randomly pointed to Karen – which is ironic because it’s probably among one of the hardest names to pronounce for non-English speaking Chinese immigrants like my mom. The R and L sounds just trip them up. To this day, unable to pronounce my name properly, my mom just kinda slurs it into something that sounds more like keh-lun.

I must say, coming up with a blog name is one of the toughest things. I wanted something catchy and travel-related like “The Poor Travelers” or “Runaway Juno.” (Juno, if you are reading this, I absolutely love your blog name!) Almost everything I came up with was either stupid or taken. I wanted my blog name to be personal, but since I didn’t want to use my first name, I was left with my unpronounceable last name: Hsin.

plague of the unpronounceable Asian name

All my life, I’ve had to endure people butchering my family name. No matter how slowly I spelled it, all the teachers, form fillers, and phone reps end up with Shin. Nope, I’d correct them. “It’s H – long pause – S – I – N.”

Well, another funny story behind my last name. In Hong Kong, my family name phonetically translates to Sin. My extended family members from my dad’s side all have the last name Sin. But when my dad immigrated to America, he had the foresight to protect us from name discrimination and added a silent H in front of our last name to prevent religious folks from associating us with the devil. There were times when I wished he’d have just changed it to Shin. It would have saved me years of having to respell my short four-letter last name.

I spent well over three days mulling over ways to add a personal touch to the name of my blog when a friend encouraged me to embrace my Asian name already used on my instagram handle. Especially given the reason why I was inspired to start my blog (see my first post), using my last name felt right. For those of you having trouble pronouncing my blog name, here’s a helpful phonetic guide:

Khsin | kāy˙sin |