I was never sure if that was actually true. But it sounds plausible. We all know Lee is popular in Asian culture. There’s also plenty of famous black (Spike) and white (Robert E., Tommy, Stan) people with the surname.
But judging by recent events, you would have thought Lee was as common as Schwarzenegger.
I was a reporter at the Star Tribune for nearly six years before leaving last December for a new job. In my place, the newspaper hired Wendy Lee, a cheerful Californian gal who happens to be a good friend of mine.
Aside from our last names, Chinese descent and mutual affection for karaoke, we are completely different people. She’s short. I’m tallish. She’s West Coast. I’m East. She’s not afraid to drive a car. Me? Well, that’s another story.
Yet people can’t help but fixate on our last name. Are we married? Are we related? Are we in fact the same person as we sometimes suspected of Michael and Janet Jackson?
The answer to all of these questions is a resounding no although I figure we’re related in the same way everyone is related to Australopithecus africanus.
The day the paper announced her hire must have been a slow news day.
“No one had anything better to say,” a friend told me. “So we just focused on your last name.”
Really? What’s so unusual about it? If Wendy Smith just replaced Thomas Smith at the Star Tribune, would anybody had noticed the similarity?
It didn’t help that a headline in a local news blog read: “Strib completes Lee for Lee swap.” I suddenly felt like a baseball card.
A few months ago, reporters gathered in a conference room for a tense staff meeting. After a few heated exchanges, the room grew quiet. My friend, never wanting to waste a perfectly good awkward moment, raised his hand.
“I want to ask a question that I think everyone here wants to ask,” he deadpanned. “Is Tom Lee related to Wendy Lee?”
Aside from a few muffled giggles, no one really understood the joke, including the editor running the meeting.
“Um…I don’t think so,” the editor dutifully answered. “I do know that they know each other quite well.”
After a while, people grew bored with the last name thing. So they started to focus on our looks.
“You know, Wendy Lee is much cuter than you Tom,” I heard more than once.
Now, I completely agree that Wendy is much cuter than me. In fact, I would feel downright uncomfortable if people said I was much cuter than Wendy. (I guess I just don’t equate myself with “cute” in any sense of the word.)
But why would the question even come up? Do we always like to compare the attractiveness of present and previous employees? If the paper announced Wendy Smith is replacing Tom Smith, do people automatically think: I wonder if she’s cuter than him?
Perhaps I should change my last name to Schwarzenegger. That way, there would be no need to wonder whether Arnold or myself would win the title.
It’s pretty obvious, no?
by Thomas Lee
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