At the Oscars earlier this week, when host Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the names of actor Mahershala Ali and tourist Yulree Chun, I couldn’t help but think of the times I’d been teased as a kid. My last name inspired howls and hoots, a way for bullies to tell me that I was different, that I was somehow less than American.

When I got married, it would have been the perfect opportunity to change my last name to my husband’s Serbian one. But I’d spent years building my byline, and I didn’t want to give up the name or the heritage my father had passed down to me.

An increasing number of newly married women are forgoing the tradition. Nationally, about 20 percent of women who married in recent years kept their last names, a study suggests. That’s compared with the 18 percent who kept their maiden name in the 1990s, and 14 percent in the ’80s. Another 10 percent hyphenate their names or use their maiden name professionally. Among my closest female friends from college — who married later, after graduate school and after they established their careers — many kept their maiden names, trends reflected in the study.

I’ve heard of couples, both gay and straight, who adopt a new surname to define themselves as a unit after getting married. Some women keep their maiden name at work, but officially, on their license and at their children’s school, they have another identity. To me, it felt like straddling, trying to have it both ways. I also wondered if taking my husband’s last name might confuse others, because it would mask my ethnic identity.

Years ago, I arranged an interview by phone. When I showed up, the source couldn’t hide his shock. He thought my last name was spelled “Waugh” like the British writer Evelyn Waugh, and he’d imagined a different picture of me. I could see the wheels grinding in his head: “Oh … she’s Asian.” If I changed my last name to my husband’s, that dissonance would happen again and again.

A friend told me about a Chinese American woman who faced the similar ethnic conundrum when she married her non-Chinese husband. She took her husband’s name but switched her first name to something Chinese — the name her parents had given her or another one, I didn’t know. If I’d adopted that strategy and taken my husband’s surname and replaced Vanessa with Tien-Fong (my Chinese name), we joked that I would have the perfect moniker for NPR, in line with Sylvia Poggioli and Snigdha Prakash, radio correspondents with tongue-twisting, mellifluous appellations.

Jokes aside, a recent study found that job applicants with Asian surnames faced discrimination. Job applicants in Canada with names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin were 28 percent less likely to get called in for an interview, compared with those with Anglo names, even when the qualifications were the same.

Companies surveyed were concerned that applicants with Asian surnames would have language problems, according to Jeffrey G. Reitz, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. In addition, employers were concerned about the prospect’s risk of failure, and getting blamed for that failure. He noted that it’s possible many employers harbored implicit bias — an unconscious negative association for minorities.

That’s infuriating. It doesn’t matter if you were born here, if you majored in English or if you devoted yourself to the writing craft; if your name comes off as foreign, you may end up getting turned away. Another study found that Asian job candidates in the United States were twice as likely to get a call back if they changed their names and excluded race-based honors and organizations (a finding that held true for African Americans, too).

Could changing my last name have helped my career, in the past and in the future? These studies seem to suggest that it would. And no doubt, sharing a last name among my husband, my twins, and me could make life simpler. More than once, I’ve pictured scenarios at the airport or at the hospital where I had to plead with an official that I was mother to the twins though we didn’t have the same last name.

“Were you born in America?” Gege asked the other day. Was he trying to figure out why I had a different last name from him, his brother, and his father? I wondered if the president’s proposed border wall and immigration ban had seeped into his consciousness. Or perhaps the question stemmed from his obsession with the movie “Cars 2,” with its international cast of race cars in the colors of their flag — Francesco Bernoulli from Italy, Shu Todoroki from Japan, and the all-American hero Lightning McQueen in red.

“Yes,” I said. “Grandma Hua was born in China. But we’re all American.”

Keeping my last name is about my identity, my ambitions. The twins will have their own. Their middle names incorporate part of my last name: Huajian, which means “glorious health” and Huaren, “glorious kindness.” A gift from my late father, who lived long enough to cuddle them in his lap and to make plans for vacations he never got to take with them.

I miss my father every day, but when I see certain mannerisms in the twins — when I stroke the elfin ears on Didi, and when I brush the cowlicks swirling on the back of Gege’s head — my father and our family’s name lives on.

Vanessa Hua’s column appears Fridays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com