Make yourself at home.

Typically when you meet people for the first time, it's polite to introduce yourself with "Hi, my name is [insert name]". However in my circumstance, 9 out of the 10 times I'm met with "Huh? Say that again". A name is one of the most important parts of your life, it is everywhere you go and with everyone you meet. So it is only appropriate to tell you the story of "Enget", as in the name that turned into a person.

Being from an immigrant family who migrated from Vietnam to the United States only a few years before I was born, you're met with some immediate hardships. The first of many being the need to learn a new language, in this case, English or to some people "American".

When I was born on May 15, 1988 in San Francisco, CA, where I lived only 2 years of my infant life, my parents were given the ultimate test, the naming of a child in a foreign language. To be culturally accepted, my parents figured why not use an "American" name. After all, it'll be much easier to pronounce than my three siblings whose names, when translated means, fresh, flower and happy. 

So after much deliberation, probably a total of 5 minutes, my parents decided on one name that had no specific meaning to them, but something they felt would resonate with American culture. But there was one obstacle. Remember the part when I said they had only immigrated to the United States a few years earlier? Well this meant that their English wasn't the best, for a lack of better terms, it was broken, very broken.

So when asked by the nurse, what you'd like to name your child, my mother, the sweetest woman I know, tried all her might to spell the name she wanted for her child, but it was lost in translation and misspellings. So in the end, or should I say the beginning, a child was put on this Earth to be crowned with the name Enget Dang. That lucky child was me.