My full name is Sabrina Sarah Cha.

I was named Sabrina by my parents who were avid fans of the 1954 film, starring Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina. However, this film isn’t well known to the generation I grew up in, and because of this, people often assumed my name had a relation to the American television sitcom, Sabrina the Teenage Witch. This never bothered me as I haven’t seen the film I was named after either.

My middle name, Sarah, is my paternal grandmother’s Catholic name. I actually only recently discovered that my grandmother and my late grandfather had actually adopted their Catholic names together, naming themselves Abraham and Sarah. I am also the only one of my cousins who was given an English middle name, while they were all given Korean ones. I was always told that this was because I was the only girl born in three generations of the Cha family.

My last name Cha is not a very common surname in Korea. In Chinese, a literal translation of my last name translates it to che, or “car.” Growing up, I learned that there was only one clan in Korea that used the surname, Cha, meaning everyone with this last name today is virtually somewhat related to one another. However, I’ve never met anyone with this surname that wasn’t part of my family.