How ‘Jiverly Wong’ is a Vietnamese name

The man who allegedly massacred 13 people at a New York community service center has been identified as a Vietnamese immigrant - prompting some people to scratch their heads, “How’s Jiverly Wong (pictured) a Vietnamese name?”

If that’s the question in your mind, you’ve come to the right place.

The key to understanding the 41-year-old’s name is in the spelling his father uses, Henry Voong.

That is a typical Vietnamese spelling of a name that’s very common in the Nùng ethnic group. The Nung are a proud people whose living area spans the inland Southeast Asia and overlaps Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and China. A loose analogy may be to the Kurds in the Middle East, who are numerous and live in a large area but (at least until recently) have never had their own independent nation.

Believed to have originated in current-day Thailand, the majority of this ethnicity now live in Guangxi, China. Because they are so spread out, there are some Nung who think of themselves as Chinese, or as Laotian, or as Vietnamese – in addition to considering themselves Nung.

The name Voòng is the common Vietnamese spelling for the same family name that is spelled Vang by Nung living in Laos (same spelling as in General Vang Pao but Vang Pao is Hmong), Wong in Cantonese Chinese, or Wang in Mandarin Chinese.

Which indicates that Jiverly Wong, who also used the name Jiverly Voong, may be a Nung from Vietnam.

A note on pronunciation: The double-o in Voòng is rare in Vietnamese. The Bolsavik only knows of two words with that spelling: boong (the deck of a boat) and xoong (a pot that you cook with). The sound “oong” in Vietnamese is used to denote the open “ong” as in the English “long” or “strong” where your mouth is open after saying it. The Vietnamese “ong” as in ong (a bee), Long (the first name), Phong (the first name), etc. ends with your mouth closed.