My Names

Yesterday was a big mail day! I got my Green Card with my new name on it; I also got my marriage and birth certificates back from the government; Naisi also sent me two letters.

So 300 dollars and 4 months later, I officially became Sherry Li Carr. Hopefully this is the name I'll use for the rest of my life. NO MORE name changes!!

If you're bored to death right now and have nothing better to do, you can read on about my name stories. But this post is for my posterity to come, so they don't get confused in their geneology work :-)

I have four names, just secular. My parents started me with Li Yong李勇, meaning brave, which is 100% a boy's name in China. But I was the only girl of all my cousins on my dad's side. So they decided to blend me in with a boy's name. I didn't mind it at all. I grew up as a Tom Boy.

This lasted till I had to get my ID, which is almost the end of high school. In my dialect, the Y and R sounds are the same. So the ID officer put down my name for Li Rong李荣，meaning glory, because it sounded more like a girl's name. Somehow, my mom didn't see it and it stayed on my ID and couldn't be changed.

So up till college, all my friends know me as Li Yong. And after that, people know me as Li Rong. It's very confusing when my friends from high school and college get together and would call me differently. I almost had identity crisis in college.

In college, I met my first foreign teacher from America. He had such a hard time remembering our names that he decided to give us English names. He passed a name list around and when the list came to me, Sherry was the only one that sounded nice. So I became Sherry Li for my foreign friends. I continued to use this name after I came to America. But legally I'm still Rong Li, and I HATED it! Why? Because they always call me "Wrong". "Are you wrong?" "Uggh... No!! YOU are WRONG!"

"Honey, you're wrong!" "No sweety, YOU are Rong(Wrong)! " John never gets tired of this silly inside joke.

So when I married John, I decided to change my name into Sherry Li Carr. But beause it involves the change of my first name, I had to go to court. When we got there, the clerk in the hall asked me "why are you changing your first name?" I answered, "because it's wrong (Rong)". "Wrong? How can a name be wrong?" She got really confused and we got a big kick out of it :-)

Now all my legal documents show me as SHERRY LI CARR except my Chinese passport, which will remain the same until I get an American passport! My life seems so much simpler. I hope I'll never have to explain to my employers about my names any more.