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Re:The effects of growing up with an extremely common name by madcaptenor on Wednesday May 10, 2017 @03:44PM (#14311002)
"I even considered Korean surnames (particularly "Park"), because Korean was a language isolate (cognates are the biggest sources of variant spellings, and language isolates have no cognates), all Korean surnames are monosyllabic, and I liked that it would totally mislead people as to my ethnicity, but I eventually rejected them."

I taught at a university with a lot of students of Korean descent. I kept getting e-mails from one of my students whose last name was Park and answering them. I hadn't put a face to his name because I had large classes, but I'll admit I assumed he was Korean. One day he came to office hours and it turned out he was a white guy.

So I can confirm that that would have successfully misled at least some people. I suspect "Lee" would have worked as well.

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