jackielgu.github.io/please-talk-to-me/

I spent a good portion of my high school years crying, then telling the internet about it. I suppose I struck the concern of some other Tumblr users, some who knew me in real life and some who didn't. One day a user named daniell sent me a message out of nowhere telling me he liked how I wrote about sadness. I didn't know who he was or how he found my blog, so I trawled through his blog a bit and typed back a response. He replied again: We exchanged emails and began chatting on Gchat. His name was Soup, short for Chi-sup, the Korean name his parents gave him. Laments by him and every other immigrant kid with a foreign-sounding name: picking an Average Joe moniker to be more consumable to the American tongue, squirming under the stares when their teachers mispronounce their names, butchered spellings on mandatory class-wide Valentine's cards. The name on his birth certificate was Daniel, but no one ever called him that. Daniel Chi-sup Suh. I never said any part of his name out loud. To

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• Bonnie Chin
• Annie Zhou