I’ve been thinking more and more about changing my name. Stephen Ming is just not who I want to be anymore. When I was a kid, I was teased as Ming the Merciless. Even though I was pretty good at handing out mercy to those troglodytes.
And though almost everyone named Ming is Chinese, I’m not remotely Chinese. One of my great grandfathers was originally named Merab Gamsakhurdia but after he came to America and got tired of people butchering his name trying to pronounce it, he changed his surname to Ming because he was Mingrelian, an ethnic group from what’s now the Republic of Georgia.
Within a generation, that hadn’t worked out so well since by then the best known Mingrelian was Lavrenti Beria and during the Red Scare it wasn’t a good idea for it to be known that you had any connection to the Soviet Union, especially if that particular monster might be discovered to be a cousin of yours.
Merab had married a Romanian immigrant and their son married an American-born woman of Italian/French descent. Then along came my dad who met my mom in college. She’s Scots-Irish and English. So I’m only one-eighth Mingrelian. A ginger with a Chinese name.
But I’m having a tough time picking a new name for myself. Probably keep the Stephen. No, definitely keep the Stephen. For sure. And maybe only a slight change for the surname. King sounds fine. What could possibly go wrong?
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There’s more than one? 😂
My last name is made up too, but it was in reverse. The original was too plain :D
Ha ha... a ginger with a Chinese name. I love the roundabout way this character came by the name of Ming!
A family member recently changed their surname. You're the one who had to carry the name, so choose the one you want!