Luka

One of the things that was hard when my family moved from Romania to Canada in 1986, was that nobody could understand or say my name. It was always so embarrassing.  They would ask what my name was, and when I said Raluca, invariably, they asked me again, which made me feel very  self conscious.

As a newly arrived immigrant, in a foreign culture that I and everyone I knew in Romania, had revered all our lives, all I wanted was to be accepted and fit in as quickly as possible. My name made that a non starter. After asking me to repeat my name, people would often ask me to spell it, which was even worse, because I couldn’t speak English or French at first, and spelling in a different language was really hard, so I’d often get my own name wrong.

By the time I was 16, just over a year after we moved from Romania, I had had enough of this. It was 1988, and Susan Vega’s song “Luka” was popular. I couldn’t understand anything except “My name is Luka, I live on the second floor”. I thought that Luka was pretty close to Raluca, and nobody should have any trouble understanding or saying it with this song being so popular. So I decided, as I was about to go into a new school, that I’d start from scratch, and tell everyone my name was Luka.

It worked great. Everyone had a much easier time understanding and saying my name. So I stuck with it for the next 6 years, through University. Eventually, as my English improved and I became fluent, I found out more about the song that gave me my name. First of all, to my dismay, in Susanne Vega’s song, Luka was a boy! It now made sense why throughout the years, I had never met another girl named Luka, only boys. I had assumed that Luka was a girl’s name since a girl sang it, and I couldn’t understand any of the words... Second, and more disturbing though, I found out that the song was about a boy named Luka who was being physically abused. What? That was not the association I was going for. Although now I can appreciate this beautiful, sad song, back then I just wanted something "normal".

Eventually, in 1994, after graduating University, I started to feel more confident, and as I started my first job in engineering at Pratt & Whitney, I decided to introduce myself to my new colleagues by my real name. People still asked me to repeat and spell it, but by now, I had no trouble spelling in English or French, and I didn’t mind repeating.

Going back to my real name was a sort of turning point. I finally felt confident enough, and okay with myself enough, and I told myself that if someone wants to know me, it’s really not too much to ask for them to say my name, even though it might be a little difficult or unusual at first.

To my surprise, ever since I went back to my name, I have received many compliments on it. People often, to this day, tell me how nice it is, and when they ask me where I’m from, I am no longer ashamed to say, and I no longer feel uncomfortable.

Some of my closest friends from my University days still call me Luka. I feel an emotional attachment to that name now, and I do love it, because it represents the person I was then and most of all the hardship of trying so hard to fit into a new culture, new environment, new language, etc. And I also think that it’s really funny that it totally backfired, how I thought I was picking this really cool name for myself from this really cool song, but instead neither the song nor the name were what I imagined. It was not what I was going for, but in the end, I actually think it’s more fitting like that.

Peace