What the fnu?
In 2013, I applied for a travel visa to the United States. Along with the visa, America, with her boundless generosity, also granted me a new name.
FNU? Was this a typo? Did someone’s cat enter my details into the system? Perhaps this was an unofficial designation. An ancient prefix. A modern pronoun? I wasn’t able to clarify. The US Embassy in Mumbai is famous for not having the time nor the relevant security protocol to deal with stragglers trying to make sense of their personal details. I was ushered back onto the street, questions unanswered, left to embrace a new alias gifted to me by the pushy, and sometimes ironic Sam Uncle.
FNU, as I would soon come to learn, stands for “First Name Unknown.” This was strange, mildly infuriating even, because I’ve always been quite sure of my first name. In fact, I was certain that this name was made known, clearly and in capital letters, in multiple sections on the mountain of paperwork I had submitted to the USCIS.
FNU, which should have at least been typed out as F.N.U. to stand out as a clear abbreviation, could easily disguise itself as an actual part of my name. No dots to separate the letters. Just three alphabets strung together without a clear linguistic reference for their pronunciation. Fnoo? Fuh-nu?
The gnu, an African even-toed ungulate, is the only close taxonomic relative to the fnu. Similarly misunderstood, gnus and fnus have only one other thing in common: they both long for non-fatal, uncomplicated migrations to foreign lands.
To report that someone’s first name is unknown sounds to me like the work of a lazy detective. Any embassy clerk, even one without a high school diploma, could have easily spoken to one of my parents to locate this supposedly elusive name. They could have discussed the matter with the employer that was sponsoring my visa. They could have at the very least stalked my publicly available Facebook profile, where they would find a spring of acquaintances making my first name known to the world every single September on my birthday.
To report that someone with the name, George Joseph, has a first name that is unknown sounds to me like a really bad joke. George and Joseph are both first names after all. I have more first names in my name than the average Joe. My father, a self-respecting Joe Thomas, has more first names than the average Joe. In the Malayali Christian community that I hail from, the one thing we have to offer the world is an abundance of first names. All America had to do was pick one. Yet, due to a glitch in the bureaucratic matrix that is US Immigration, I would henceforth be known to American authorities as Fnu George Joseph.
My brother, Fnu Thomas Joseph, first encountered this when he emigrated to the States a few years earlier. Since we have a similar origin story, and both share a common culprit in the way our names were entered in our very first passports, Fnu Thomas Joseph, like the Indian spy that he wasn’t, had been living a sort of double life in the country. According to his friends, his colleagues, and the barista at his local Starbucks in La Jolla, his name was Thomas. Simple, a common first name shared by scores of American immigration agents and members of the American public alike. According to his Social Security card, however, his bank, his driver’s license, and Martha from the accounts team at his company, his name was Fnu, an idiosyncratic name that would never fail to raise eyebrows.
In fact, when I took my first trip to the US in 2013, an immigration officer at LAX questioned me at length about the discrepancy in my name. The name on my B1/B2 was not reflective of the name on my passport. How could it be? Was the officer testing me? Was he not given the relevant training material on his country’s approach to classifying and naming foreigners? Was he really asking me, an Asian uneven-toed biped with an unknown first name, to explain how his system, a taxonomic model that cannot locate people’s first names in the first place, made any sense?
To have a Fnu on your visa wasn’t just a silly bureaucratic error, it was cursed nomenclature that would follow you and haunt you for the rest of your days in the USA.
While gnus can be found freely roaming the Serengeti, the first time I encountered another fnu in the wild was when ordering an Uber in San Francisco. I called for a car and was ecstatic when I found out that Fnu (4.9★) was just a few minutes away. I imagine this feeling is shared by people with names like Humbert, Beatrice, or Nosferatu. To be matched on Uber with a rare namesake is an algorithmic blessing that must be acknowledged and cherished. I felt the need to engage.
“Thanks for picking me up. What’s your name?”
“Fnu.”
“No, it’s not.“
“Ya, it is.”
“What’s your real name?”
“What?”
“What’s your real name?”
“Oh, it’s Abhishek.”
“Well, nice to meet you, I’m also a Fnu.”
“Oh, what?!”
“Yep. Why did you tell me your name was Fnu?”
“It’s easier if I just go with it, instead of trying to explain it to people.”
“But why is your name Fnu on Uber?”
“My profile is linked to my license.”
“So you’ve just been letting thousands of passengers call you Fnu for years.”
“It’s easier to pronounce than Abhishek.”
A few years later I met another Fnu. This time in a Lyft. Fnu was an older man from Kabul. He shared stories of how he had moved to the US to seek asylum, how he was grateful for the opportunity his family had been given, and how although he didn’t mind having an imposter’s name on all his official identification, it did make him feel stripped off his identity. “This is what has been given to me. I cannot change it.”
It’s an unfortunate coincidence that “fnu” is an anagram for “fun,” a word that is the total opposite of one’s experience living in a country with this name. When your visa to enter the US comes with an FNU on it, so will every other piece of official documentation that comes after. Any form of government ID must carry this name. Your employer uses this name on their records. Your American driver’s license will feature it. So will your driver profile on Uber, Lyft, or any other sanctimonious ride-sharing service. You can only change this if you change the name on your visa. You can only change the name on your US visa if you amend the name on your passport. And if you’re from a country like India, or Afghanistan for that matter, this involves going back home, and mustering the patience and appetite to deal with more bureaucratic machinery that has been designed to remove all common sense from its process.
I decided to go through this ordeal before I set off on my 2016 migration to the US. I had to apply for a new visa, one that would impact all of my subsequent documentation. I had some time, and the fair warnings of an older brother named Fnu to sway me into getting the name in my passport changed from George Joseph to George, Joseph. This subtle shift would now make my first name known to the United States of America.
Government offices everywhere are surprisingly bad at making simple processes feel human. By default, they are designed to mistrust the claims that ordinary people make, even when they are about something as straightforward as a visa applicant’s own name. I once faced a similar experience when applying for a work permit at the Kreisverswaltungsreferat in Munich. My atypical passport threw a wrench in the neat system of German naming conventions. Instead of looking up from their computer and confirming my name—an act that would have taken a total of four seconds—the officer handed over a work permit with a name that ended with a cold, mechanical “+” symbol. George Joseph +. A new and improved version of my previous self. One that was capable of pronouncing words like Kreisverswaltungsreferat to unsuspecting Bavarians.
Fnu is the sort of name that appears exotic enough to be real. It’s the type of name that only a small handful of people in a place like San Francisco would even think to enquire about. “Is that, like, a Middle Eastern name?” Across the States, Fnus have accepted their designation like it were an American knighthood. They continue to emigrate to the country, collect their paychecks, drive Ubers, and sign up for dating apps to go on dates with Rebeccas and Alisons and Marks and Michelles and plenty of others who will never know what it’s like to live with a name that was never yours to begin with.
