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The Trouble with Christina
Jan 2009
Dec
Nov
Like many good yarns, this one is about a young woman I met just once
years ago and have never seen again. I do not recall her as
witty, brilliant or striking. We chatted in a basement office for
perhaps ten minutes before forever parting ways. I barely remember
her bright smile and soft features. All that burns in my
memory is her name: Christina. No first name nor last name,
simply Christina.
Someone could write an accurately-named pop song about this girl.
A Hollywood Backstory
The legend of Christina begins in some poverty-stricken dictatorship
in the swirling tragedy of southeast Asia. A young couple crouches
along barbed wire and sloshes through mud, as screams and searchlights
dance across the landscape. The wife manages despite her rotund belly,
which carries their child for its final weeks in the womb. The
family escapes to a dilapidated boat and, one screen wipe later,
is huddled in a delivery room with an INS agent stationed outside the door.
Though they speak no English, the clipboard placed in their arms has an
obvious purpose. Desperate to give their tiny daughter the promise of
opportunity America holds, they opt to grant her an American name.
With no knowledge of the language or even the symbols used to write,
they dutifully copy the block lettering from the nametag of the attending
nurse: C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. A few insistent gestures later, they have
granted her an unlikely name.
A Beautiful Lie
The story above is certainly apocryphal but would make for a fantastic
trailer for the summer blockbuster season. The precise details of the truth
have faded from memory, but the essential outcome remains: Christina
was simply named Christina.
Although I admit to poetic license with the heroic origin, the lifelong
implications of mono-nomenclature belong in a completely different
genre of film. Christina’s real life floated between moments
of comedy and frustration. For almost everyone around her, that name
presented a serious problem.
First and Last
Western culture is so accustomed to the division of identity into
names and surnames that someone without either sounds like the windup
to a joke. But Christina is no punchline, she is a real person
living in a world which expects names to fit into two boxes.
She has neither a first nor a last name, simply one name,
forever floating between those false assignations like a quantum
particle. Having only one name is like having no name at all:
you are inoperable, unclassifiable—an outlier.
Now that guy made sure people got his name right.
A one-word identity is not much of a problem in the first years of life,
when parents handle most of your social and administrative tasks.
Paper forms can be easily navigated with a minor amendment. Introductions
require minimal discourse. The topic of surnames and lineage rarely
appears on the docket at playtime with the neighbors. A name consisting of
only “Christina” is no problem.
But enter into the first terrifying bureaucracy of civilized life and
the curse of one name will become painfully acute. Schools require
organization, which means enrollment databases, immunization records,
standardized test scores, attendance rosters, grade reports and
transcripts. For every system, there are two boxes, and the one name
rightly belongs in neither. Without proper records, the child does
not exist. One round peg must be split between two square holes.
Compromises
Sometimes administrators of these stubborn, rigid infrastructures would
compassionately bend rules and let the adorable girl slip through
unregistered. Usually, though, her one name would be bastardized per
the boundary conditions of the system at hand. Sometimes “Christina”
became her sole last name with her first name left blank. Sometimes,
like the infant before Solomon, her soul would be cleaved evenly
in two as “Chris” and “Tina.” Occasionally data stewards
would enter “None” or “Blank,” naming her “Christina
None,” or “Blank, Christina.” None of these mutations
were correct, and of course none were compatible with each other.
Life with one name becomes more frustrating and untenable with age.
Christina had a wallet full of one-of-a-kind artifacts: a drivers
license with one name, a library card with the surname “Doe”,
credit cards with fictitious raised lettering and even a student ID
with the ominous word “None” enclosed in parenthesis. Every
document told a story of scratched heads, supervisors called and
frustrations shared. Her paper trail was one of tears and impossibility.
Lessons
Creators of paper forms for apartment leases, promotional mailers,
event registrations and life insurance enrollment agreements should
take heed: not all souls require two boxes. The world is full of
John Does and Mary Smiths, but far more of
ابدَلاه
هاداد and
成 蘭. There are the Christinas, of course,
but even petulant rock stars deserve
a way to precisely state their own name. Two boxes, plus a tiny space
for a middle initial, is mostly sufficient but entirely wrong.
Managing your name might seem like the simplest of all computerized
tasks, but the databases of the world assume that a mononym
is an error. Many also shudder and recoil at the offer of
“O’Bannon,” “McCloud,” “Tyson-Sheffield”
or “de La Cruz.” A “Mary Sue” Ellen may find the second
half of her first name converted to a middle initial. Names are not easy.
Dismissing their complexity with a few rules might be the common solution,
but it is certainly not a comprehensive approach.
Afterword
Cleaning up the billions of metadata hierarchies and information
architectures which improperly model names is more than an
afternoon’s work, so I will leave it for a future essay.
But the real question of Christina remains. Since our rendezvous those
many years ago, the web has exploded as the primary means of electronic
information exchange. How has poor Christina faired in requesting
an email account, signing up for Facebook, or posting a resume to
Monster.com? Can she order from Amazon with a malformed mailing address?
Can she apply for employer benefits or online banking? Her single name has
likely trapped her the early 1990’s, running errands in person
instead of pointing and clicking her way to freedom.
My deepest hope, for her sake, is that she found a man and married him for his
name.
Further Reading:
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