Many Koreans immigrating to America recognize the importance of assuming an American name. Ko Hyun Hee becomes Nancy Ko and Kim Seung He becomes Fred Kim. Many Koreans may not know that it works the same way for Americans settling in Korea.
When my group of Peace Corps Volunteers arrived in Korea, the first job of our instructors was to assign us all Korean names. This was an important ritual. My name ¡°Chris Foreman¡± was transformed into ¡°O Song Min¡±. Foreman = O Min and Chris = Song. My best friend ¡°James McGuire¡± became ¡°Meng Jin Su¡±. Karen Bachelor became ¡°Bek Ke Ran¡±.

Koreans should be grateful that they must convert their name into only one new language. We all had to learn to write our names in both Korean and in Chinese. I think my Chinese name was XXX.
Most of the names worked well, but a few of them bombed. One of my friends received the name ¡°Ko Tek Jin¡±. That name probably sounded fine to Korean ears, but the instructors quickly changed it when all the Americans called him Kotex son seng.
 
About that time, Karen Bachelor (¡°Bek Ke Ran¡± ) was sitting in a tea room with several of us. Some Korean young men were practicing their English. One of them wanted to ask Miss Bek if she were married or single. He started thumbing through a Korean/English dictionary and finally asked her hesitatingly ¡°By the way, are you a virgin?¡± Miss Bek got red in the face and the rest of us died laughing. How could such a polite person ask such an impertinent question? Apparently his dictionary defined the word ¡°aggashi¡± as ¡°virgin¡±. At one time that might have been true, but in 1972 most single Peace Corps women were of questionable virginity. For the next several weeks I could make Karen blush by asking her innocently. ¡°By the way, are you a virgin?¡± . I was cruel back then.