Losing a Piece of Juneau
We’re going to start out today by talking about the concept of a deadname. A deadname is a name that you don’t use anymore. It’s a name you don’t identify with anymore. It’s a name that is dead to you. You don’t want people using it when they address you or talk about you.
While not the only place where it holds importance, the concept of a deadname holds significant importance for the transgender community. Using someone’s deadname when they’ve asked you not to is not only disrespectful, but it also demonstrates that you’re probably not a good person to be around, in general.
While every person’s name deserves respect, and you should respect the decision of anyone who changes their name, for whatever reason, some people have much more visceral reactions to their deadname than others. For some, it can re-enforce past trauma. And for others it might just be uncomfortable.
I happen to fall in the latter camp. So, about a year ago, the first time I placed an order at Kitchen of Thai Curry in Juneau, Alaska, the owner read the name that automatically displayed on the Square device after I swiped my credit card, the name that I had never changed officially, and she had no way to know that it was my deadname.
But she got so excited! What a strange name! I should maybe mention that my deadname is not traditionally American, to the extent where, by the first day of 5th grade, half my class had already learned that when the teacher started stuttering on the first day of roll call, it meant that my name was next to be called.
But I’m pretty sure that my deadname is also not traditionally Thai, despite what countless classmates in 5th grade insisted to me. Kids are jerks. So anyway, here’s a name that the owner doesn’t recognize from her own home country, and it’s also a name she doesn’t recognize from her new one, and I imagine she had a thought of “isn’t this cool, someone has a weird name who isn’t a foreigner!”
So I couldn’t bear to ask her to use my real name.
And the next time I came in a few weeks later, her face lit up. She called me by name. She called me by my deadname. But again, she was just so happy about it, I wasn’t going to take this from her. Seeing her happy made me happy. And she’d even remembered my order.
This repeated every few weeks whenever I’d come in. So when Juneau started closing down to encourage social distancing, when restaurants all switched to take-out only to decrease cross-infection, when people started talking about how our local businesses are hurting and you should find ways to spend money on them where you can, of course I knew I had to make sure I patronized Kitchen of Thai Curry while I still could.
So I walk in. And the owner greets me like she always does. And she punches in my usual order. But the place feels strange. Not closed, but not really open. Even after I’d swiped my card, a part of me wanted to ask if they were really still serving food.
I was the only person in the restaurant this time, so we talked more than we usually do. The owner and her husband said that they had one more order of supplies coming in, that they’d placed before things got really bad, and once that was gone, they were closing.
I have this tendency, when I hear some really bad news, to assume a slightly more benign version of that really bad news. So in my head I’m thinking “Oh, they’re anticipating more stringent anti-Corona protocols, and expecting them to last a while, so they’ll open back up in a few months when this is over.”
Nope. They’re closing for good. The rent downtown is too high to pay if you’re not selling anything, and with the tourist season all but cancelled, they’re not going to earn enough this year to justify staying open, even if rent for the duration of this outbreak is waived. They might find another location with cheaper rent. Or they might open a food truck. But things are up in the air.
I’m not a stranger to goodbyes. I’ve said plenty of them. But usually there’s a bittersweetness to them. Someone’s moving on to bigger and better things, whether it’s me or the person I’m saying goodbye to. This is different, though. There isn’t anything good here. Something bad happened to these two people that was beyond their control.
And similarly-bad things are happening around the country right now. It feels eerie. Like reality is in the same state of not-closed, not-open that their restaurant is in. Maybe I’ll see them again when they open a new business. Maybe I won’t. Maybe that’s the last time the owner smiles and gets excited over getting to say the name that is no longer mine.