Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Never Have I Ever star, has resorted to using a fake name at coffee shops for a pretty tragic reason.
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The actress was caught by PEOPLE right before the release of her Pokémon Super Bowl advert, and they got chatting about the struggles Ramakrishnan has had with her name.
If I’m to be blunt, Westerners mispronouncing Eastern names isn’t a hushed secret. It happens all the time, ill-meaning or otherwise. And Ramakrishnan is no stranger to having to correct people on how to say her first name: Maitreyi (my-tray-yee).
When she was only just becoming a figure in the public eye, it got intense enough for her to make a social media post about how to properly say her name.
Speaking to PEOPLE, Ramakrishnan spoke about the struggle she still faces, and how she avoids the kerfuffle at the coffee shop by providing a totally different name.
“One hundred percent story of my life, especially with my first name,” she began. “I had a couple of viral tweets when I like first got famous. Just spelling out my name as like, My-Tray-Yee as a pronunciation.”
The Name Maitreyi Ramakrishnan Uses Instead Of Her Own At The Coffee Shop
When ordering coffee, instead of having to struggle with people saying and writing her name down, she simply provides an alternate moniker.
“I usually just say my name is Blue at like a coffee shop. I’ll just say Blue,” she explained. Having to adjust your own name, one of the only things explicitly yours, is a shame.
She also talked about how her last name doesn’t need the same treatment, however.
“See my thing is with my last name — I didn’t feel like I ever needed to do that,” she elaborated. “‘Cause my last name is just [said like it’s read]: Ramakrishnan. But then I get a lot of people saying Rama-Chrishtian, like Christianity. And I’m like, there’s no ‘T.’ This is yet again, a reading comprehension issue.”
“This is why we need to invest in education,” she joked.