“Unveiling Identity: How Names Bind Us in Kate Lu Sedor’s Captivating Exploration”
Or perhaps it simply started with me, delivered into this world with a Chinese face and a Western name, a collapsed star all on my own.
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My name is Kate (not Katherine), a name with origins in ancient Greece, often considered the cradle of the Western world. BabyNames.com tells me Kate means “purity,” a fact that never fails to make friends laugh, because I swear worse than a sailor and have a petty streak approximately the width of the Mississippi River. My mother chose it for no reason other than that she liked it, and certainly liked it better than her father’s choice, Ellen, a designation I would later discover was given to dozens of other Chinese American girls born in the early ’90s — so many that it has become its own cliché.
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