How I became Jickay
This is a picture taken when I was about 5 or 6. The year was 1990. I think at this point the internet was still at the Pentagon. At my elementary school there were 3 green screen Apple computers, and they ate floppy discs. Yes, this was when we played Oregon Trail and everyone got dysentery. At this age I don't think we had a computer at home yet. I'm sure we had an Atari and maybe a NES in a couple years. Eventually the DOS and Windows 3.1 era came and gone. When I hit my early teens and graduated from elementary school that's when it came. Dial-up. There are faint memories of a free internet service with 60% of the screen being ad space. Eventually that went away and the logins started coming. Free email with Hotmail by Microsoft. ICQ (Uh-oh!). And the early days of social pages in my circles were Calgary Planet and Asian Avenue. They were like Geocities for, well, Calgary and Asians. At first it was kind of exciting thinking of a new alias, conjuring up a virtual identity. But soon the names got flooded and everything resembling normal English was taken. That's when all the 88's, 69's, 00's, underscores, and username jargon was born. (Now, every site needs a login, and if you make me sign up for another account with another obscure password combination and ask me for my mom's non-existent maiden name I'll go ALL CAPS I swear!) Very quickly I got sick of trying a dozen different combinations of things my early teenage mind thought were awesome and getting them all rejected. I though, there has to be something I can make that no one else has thought of. Being Chinese-Vietnamese in background, my parents mainly spoke in Cantonese. I learned that in Chinese there are many foreign words that are translated purely by the way they sound, or phonetics, simply because there was no Chinese equivalent. It's kind of like the English term 'chop suey', which is actually pronounced 'jap-choy' in Cantonese and it means assorted vegetables. One example is actually the word 'Canada'. In Cantonese, it's pronounced 'ka-la-dai'. So, I thought what if I butchered my English name into pseudo-Cantonese and spelled it with the English alphabet. Jacky would become 'jick-kay' and so Jickay was born. I hammered it into the registration screen and it worked. No zeros, no numbers, no underscores or extensions needed. Just plain jickay. Even now jickay is my gmail account since they launched and stand in for pretty much every account I use. Out of all the billions of accounts out there I have only had it rejected twice, and they were inactive users! Jickay was born that day out of the frustration of not being able to get a clean name I wanted and the desire to be unique. Now, I only hope that one day my real life persona will be able to live up to the name.
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