The U.S. Social Security Administration lists Linda as the fourth most popular name for a girl in the last 100 years, and there are a wealth of articles, which tout Linda as the trendiest name for a girl in U.S. history, reaching its peak in 1947. However, last year, my best friend Brenda sent me an article from The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Where have all the Linda’s gone.”… Alas, I’m not so trendy anymore.
The story of this Linda, and Brenda, too, begins with Japanese moms who were two of the more than 40,000 women who emigrated from Japan to the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II as the wives of U.S. military servicemen. Both of our dads were born and raised in the American South, mine in Tennessee and Brenda’s in Mississippi, and as the South has its own distinct cultural identity, we as hafus or hapas often refer to ourselves as half-Japanese and half-Southern in addition to half-American.
Like most immigrants, my mom learned a lot about her new country through television. She came to live in the U.S. in 1957. Watching the Miss America pageant in 1959, she thought Miss Mississippi, Lynda Lee Mead, the woman who was crowned Miss America that year was so beautiful, she hoped her American daughter would be too, so she named me after her.
Brenda is named after her dad’s favorite American country music singer and Georgia native, Brenda Lee.
Japanese people typically have trouble pronouncing L’s and sometime R’s, too, so why our parents would choose these names for us has been somewhat baffling. The first time I met Brenda, when I was 11 years old and she was 12, I thought her mom said her name was Belinda, and I told Brenda I thought that was so cool, because of course my name is Linda, but Brenda quickly corrected me.
Often, Americans find it difficult to pronounce Japanese names. So it’s no surprise really, that many of the women in this unique group of immigrants would change their names to American ones, particularly when they became U.S. citizens. My mom’s name was Hisae and Brenda’s mom’s name was Yoshiko. Their American names: Joyce and Miki, were chosen by their husbands.
As a small child growing up, even though my name is spelled with an I, when my family was stationed at an Air Force base in Texas, everyone wanted to spell it with a Y, because that’s how Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter at that time, spelled her name, And, even though my mom named me Linda, she favored the Japanese spin she put on my name calling me Linko-chan most of the time. My cousin who is half-Japanese and half-Australian is named Erica, and has a Japanese middle name, but my Auntie Teruko put a Japanese spin on her name, too, and she has always been Eriko.
I have another childhood friend, Lizzie, (short for Elizabeth) who is half-Japanese and half-Spanish, our families have been lifelong friends since our time stationed together in Texas and she also has a Japanese middle name – Etsuko. And in thinking about names given by dads, Brenda and I share another lifelong, half-Japanese and half-American friend whose name is Mareen. She’s always been quick to point out that it is not pronounced Maureen (Mau-reen) but is instead pronounced like U.S. Marine, and there’s no mistaking that her dad was proud to be one.
As kids growing up in the South, in school, Brenda and I were often called by other names including “jap, chink or gook” and even “Tojo Yamamoto,” the name of a wrestler on a local Memphis television program that was a precursor to the World Wrestling Federation.
As a college student, my favorite political science professor and faculty advisor would sometimes in a doting, fatherly way, refer to me as a “banana” – yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Professor “Big Dave” Evans was instrumental in the founding, and served as president of the National Foster Parents Association in the mid- to late-1970s. He had an opportunity to travel to Japan while serving in that role, and often shared with me how much he enjoyed his visit to Japan.
As a Southern woman, I am proud to be an alumna of Mississippi University for Woman, the first state-supported college for women in the United States. During my junior year in college, my roommate and suitemate, who were both from Natchez, Miss., invited me home for the weekend and arranged for me to serve during the pilgrimage, or spring tours of the stately, historic plantation homes there. Serving entailed being stuffed into a voluminous, pastel yellow, antebellum-style dress, complete with a hoop skirt, and offering tourists historical information about the home.
Serendipitously, I served in Stanton Hall and was tasked with telling tourists about my namesake Lynda Lee Mead’s room. She had slept in the room after becoming Miss America. That was my first close brush with my namesake.
The second one came years later when I had an opportunity to interview Memphis physician Dr. John Shea, Jr., the husband of Lynda Lee Mead. At the end of the interview, I mentioned that I was named after his wife and Dr. Shea snapped, “Everyone always wants to talk about her.”
As adults, references to our ethnicity continued. Working at a legal nonprofit in Memphis, the African-American executive director pointedly told me I wasn’t diverse at all, but “just another white girl.” Brenda who is a retired nurse, and whose facial features are much more Asian than mine, worked with physicians who jokingly referred to her as “sukiyaki,” or broadcast journalist Connie Chung,
Brenda worked her way through nursing school as a bartender at the Benihana restaurant in Memphis. She was the first woman bartender in the history of the restaurant chain, and had to obtain special permission from corporate headquarters to do the job. As a bartender, she had many regular customers, one of whom affectionately referred to her as “Brendihana.”
When Brenda’s son Brandon was born, her mom had trouble pronouncing his name and told all of her Japanese friends that his name was Brando, “like Marlon Brando.” Now in his mid-30s, we all still call him Brando from time to time.
Linda and Brenda may be all-American names with Southern ties to a Mississippi beauty and a famed music artist from Georgia, and we may have grown up and lived mostly in the South, but because of our moms, our lives have been rooted in Japanese culture as well, through customs, traditions, food, music, language, home décor and so much more.
There is no question our lives have been formed by the influences of both of our parents, and in the American South, the primary place we were raised and call home. We may have been bullied and teased, but our Southern twangs paired with the Asian features in our physical appearances are a living testament to the cultural richness of the American melting pot and what it means to be half-Japanese and half-Southern or half-American.
Some folks have taken issue with me over the years for referring to myself as half with a hyphen, saying that I am not half-Japanese or half-American, but simply American, since I was born and raised here, and perhaps on some level this may be true. But for me, that hyphen of half- is important.
I recently received the results from a mail-in DNA kit, and learned, not too much to my surprise, but more as a confirmation, that I am exactly 50 percent Japanese…half my mother’s daughter, and half my father’s daughter…half and half.
As someone who grew up in a truly bi-cultural household, where we always took our shoes off when we came in the door, where we had wonderful home-cooked meals of both barbeque and sukiyaki, and where I heard the Japanese voices of my mom and her friends every day, denying the Japanese half of myself would make me feel as if my mother never existed. She passed away in 1998.
My best friend Brenda’s mom is 91, and has been living with brain and lung cancer for the last five years. These strong, brave, courageous women, who survived in a country decimated by war and ventured to a new country they knew little about, to embrace a whole new culture, raise families and contribute to the uniquely American fabric of a diverse and multifaceted society deserve to be remembered through their children, even if only through a simple hyphen.
A hyphen is a small thing, a punctuation mark joining two or more words creating a distinctly new word, with a new meaning. That new meaning and new word define Brenda and I, and many others. I’m often fond of using the word “bridge” as a metaphor to describe what it means to be half-Japanese and half-Southern, but the visual of a hyphen works well, too.
© 2024 Linda Cooper
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