My brother Shahé, teased by neighbors into ShayHey, could become Shane. My mother Yeran, whose name my classmates gleefully mispronounced as urine, could become Jasmine. And I could become Kevin McCallister, like the hero of the 1990 movie “Home Alone.” I identified with Kevin’s moxie as he outwitted two burglars, and for his role as the youngest member of a big, loud family. The McCallisters had something we did not, something I thought I wanted: “normal” names.

For weeks I marched around the house demanding a name change, but when I received a Christmas gift addressed “To Kevin,” something felt off. I felt lost. Displaced. Like something essential about me had been replaced by something disposable.

One afternoon years later, while I was home from college in Baltimore, my father summoned me into the den and asked about school. “Remember, good grades, good behavior, sky is the limit.” That was Ghevont’s mantra, his attempt at a universal truth to promote hard work and discipline.

“I want to show you something,” he said as he opened the top left drawer of his desk and pulled out a cassette tape. “This,” he said, “is all I have left of my father.”

My father’s father’s name was Vartan Vartanian. This is the Armenian equivalent of John Johnson, or William McWilliams. Vartan, a cobbler who’d rather walk 10 miles than drive 10 minutes, moved to the multilingual world of Beirut where nobody questioned how to pronounce his name, even if Lebanon’s official language couldn’t fully accommodate it.

The lack of a “V” letter in Arabic meant adopting the next closest signifier — Vartanian became Wartanian.

My father placed the transparent rectangle into the cassette player and hit play. It was a 1990 interview my cousin had conducted with my grandfather in Turkish, a language I had heard in passing but never fully understood. In his birthplace of Adana in Ottoman Turkey, like millions of his fellow indigenous Armenians, Vartan’s name was a hex in a place where being Armenian meant a ticket to deportation marches.