Anglicising Asian names: another form of racism? Just ask Phuc Bui

US professor who asked Vietnamese-American student to use a different name because hers sounded ‘like an insult’ has sparked uproar

For many Asian-Americans, the case has stirred up uncomfortable memories of being mocked because of their monikers

Reading Time:5 minutes

Published: 7:00am, 24 Jun 2020Updated: 10:38pm, 24 Jun 2020

For a professional mathematician it was a miscalculation of epic proportions. When the white American professor Matthew Hubbard asked one of his trigonometry students to ‘anglicise’ her Vietnamese name because it sounded “like an insult in English”, little can he have known he was about to set off a social media firestorm that would gain media coverage across the world.

Screenshots of his email request to the Vietnamese-American student Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen last week went viral after being posted on Instagram and Twitter, igniting the latest in a series of racism controversies to have hit the United States since the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis during an arrest by a white police officer who knelt on his neck.

The emails show Hubbard, of Laney College in Oakland, California, asking the student – whose first name ‘Phuc’ is pronounced ‘Fook’ and means “happiness” – to provide an anglicised version of her birth name on the grounds the original sounded rude in English. When the student responds by saying the request “feels discriminatory” and threatens to file a complaint with the school, Hubbard is unperturbed and follows up by reiterating the request.

“I understand you are offended, but you need to understand your name is an offensive sound in my language,” he says. “I repeat my request.”

A screenshot of the exchange between Laney College professor Matthew Hubbard and student Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen.

Hubbard has since been put on administrative leave and the college has distanced itself from his remarks. Tammeil Gilkerson, president of Laney College, said the incident was “obviously disturbing” and that the college did “not tolerate racism, discrimination or oppression of any kind”.

But by then, the damage had been done. For many Asian-Americans the treatment of Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen brought back floods of uncomfortable memories of similar treatment harking back decades.

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