The Hyphen is a Bridge

*Note: Names have been changed for privacy purposes

“Names are an intimate pocket within every language. There are no other words we arrive at quite so purposefully and lovingly as the names we give our children.” 

~ From “alfabet/alphabet” by Sadiqa de Meijer

My oldest known name is 江静月 (Jiang Jingyue). It is not my birth name and I don’t know who gave it to me. 江 is after the location I was adopted from. I’ve been told whoever gave me that name sounds like they were educated because it contains a literary term. I’ve also been told twice by Chinese people that it doesn’t sound like a real name, yet another fantasy that makes up my story. 

My parents made 静月 my legal middle name, to preserve some of my Chinese-ness, sandwiched between two European names. They broke it in two, “Jing Yue” instead of “Jingyue” as my adoption documents said. Another cut tie, a space I can’t fill. They said it was because 静月 is two characters, but I can’t help but think it’s still meant to be one name.

When I was younger, I spelled it with a hyphen, “Jing-Yue”, a bridge across the space. When I was in high school and renewing my passport, I learned it should be “Jing Yue”. I realized that some of my official documents had it as “Jing Yue” and others “Jing-Yue”. It hasn’t yet caused any problems, but I’m anxious now every time I have to include it. I suspect based on a document trail that my parents meant for it to be a space, but I’m not sure. How to explain the hyphen? Was it a mistake or an attempt to stitch the two names back into one, 静-月, instead of 静_月? 

What better symbol of the identity confusion of an adoptee, that she is not sure how to spell the oldest of her names?

Some people consider renaming an adoptee an act of violence, stripping them of their previous identity to replace it with your own. I’m not sure. Once it has emerged from its chrysalis, no one calls the butterfly a caterpillar anymore. It is still the same being, but it has emerged changed. I do not feel like 江静月. 

Sometimes, I consider if I would change my documents to match. It seems like a lot of effort and time. The story of an adoptee, anything related to identity is a lot of effort and time.

I’m not sure what I would pick, would I choose the “-”, to bridge the space or would I choose the “_” as my adoptive parents intended? Or would I choose to close the gap and get rid of the confusion, 静月 once more? Would I go back to 江静月 or choose a new name entirely, metamorphosize myself on my own terms? I do not know. Until I do, I stay with my current names, where only the names my adoptive parents gave me are certain.

“How do we pronounce our skin in English”

~ From “granted to a foreign citizen” by Sun Yung Shin

By Hannah

Asian Heritage Month

What is Asian Heritage Month for this adoptee? It is an open wound, a floundering, a contradiction. It is a fierce pride in who I am, in who my ancestors were, and in the rich culture and stories of my ancestors. It is also an intense need to minimize myself and not self-identify as Asian. How can I celebrate Asian pride when I don’t know daily cultural rituals or the traditional way of mourning? When I’m learning more about my culture through novels and other kinds of media because it’s not something I instinctively know. When I don’t know how to make traditional food. When I can’t correctly pronounce words in my original language or my own Chinese name, and I need to download a language app to learn the basics like “how are you” and “my name is.”

How can I celebrate Asian pride, myself and my Asianness when I feel like a fraud? For so long, I identified more with the white community I grew up in and my mom’s white friends than with people of colour. I used to want to be white and have people view me as white, even though it’s obvious I’m not, especially when standing next to my family. I always chose the pretty blond Barbies; my ideal image was blonde and blue-eyed. I used to write stories where the main character was always white (either blonde or redhead). I would consume Western media where the Asian character, if there was one at all, was the stereotypical sidekick, such as the nerdy best friend who was just there. The books I read were used all about white characters exploring their stories, traumas, falling in love, and solving mysteries. Whatever the case, I would always surround myself with the white, Westernized character. Because that’s who I wanted to be, who I tried to be by minimizing my Asian heritage and my original family’s history, which still feels real despite being unknown to me. The stories are etched into my skin in invisible ink, and I just have to find the right light to read them. 

I have a shirt that says “Phenomenally Asian” that I love. Every time I put it on, especially during May, I hesitate, creating space for my doubts to grow. Am I really Asian enough to wear this to proclaim such a statement? To me, my upbringing and lack of knowledge of my culture suggest no. But I want to reclaim what I’ve lost, learn what I don’t know, and feel pride in this education. I want to reclaim my “Asianness” in a way that feels real, authentic and accessible to me.  

I’ve consumed and participated in Chinese events and celebrations, but they’ve always been Westernized and under the guise that they will be consumable to white people,  specifically white adoptive parents. The way I consume Asian culture feels so inauthentic and Westernized that I feel like I don’t have the right to claim the culture as mine. That I am no more than an outsider looking in, wanting to learn, wanting to appreciate. There’s no problem with that, but I also feel a deep longing to feel more of a part of the culture and the local Chinese community. Despite my upbringing in a white family and community and the privileges that proximity brings, I am still a Chinese woman. I have faced microaggressions and anxieties related to my position and identity. I have a Chinese family. I have a right to participate in my culture in a way that feels right. I just don’t know what that looks like yet, and thus, the crux of the problem.

You can connect with Brontee on Instagram @brontee_colleen

General Tso’s Recipe: A Self Portrait

Instructions:

1. Let the knife carve along the ribs of the carcass

   a. etch every groove into your mind

   b. along the compacted curves of your cerebellum

   i. following a winding road

   ii. leading into the mist

   1. a missed home.

2. Let the spatula press firmly against your tongue, massage the forgetfulness from your tastebuds

3. Let your hands knead the dough

   a. palms sink into your lobes, lines, folds

   b. tell a story of love

   c. of longevity

   i. of a red thread tightly wound against the brain.

4. Let the dough rise like the prideful puffing of the chest with passion fruit embers lying in the hearth of the bellies. 

5. Bask in the heat of the second womb, the oven of incubation that you create for yourself 

6. because you understand

7. that a recipe need not ingredients

   i. when it was you all along. 

Originally published on Good Little Girls Zine, a literary magazine dedicated to women’s empowerment. 

You can find Celeste Lian Bloom on Instagram at @celeste_lian_bloom.

Connected to What Came Before

I read an essay in the Washington Post about a Chinese American journalist who reclaimed her Chinese name as a part of her whole identity. She talked about being embarrassed by her Chinese name, having to explain it, hearing it mispronounced all the time and the ways she’s come to embrace it in the wake of anti-Asian violence in the past few years. Chinese names, or origin names, are also something I’ve been thinking about as well, especially in the recent wake of “reclaiming” identity. I’ve written before how I felt like a fake in the ways I take pride in my heritage, as if I’m doing it incorrectly. A part of that struggle includes my Chinese name; how I don’t really have one to claim.

The journalist quotes the scene in Shang Chi when the father, Wen Wu, tells Awkwafina’s character that names are important because “they connect us to what came before.” In the movie’s case, giving a name to a character humanized him as a person because Wen Wu never had a name. The online magazine Inverse did a series explaining the historical roots of Shang Chi and the Mandarin, explaining how they spent time creating a character out of the racist origins of the Mandarin. Starting with giving him a name, to create an identity, a personhood from nothing. So when I watched the movie I thought more about the writer’s intentions than the importance of a Chinese name as a connection to family. But the conversation speaks to both truths.

My Chinese name is 国艳艳 and right off the bat, most Chinese readers can tell I’m adopted. While Guo, G-U-O, is a common enough Anglicized spelling of a Chinese last name, the character 国 itself just means land, country, nation-state, China. It’s a stand-in last name, a formality for some paperwork. By no means would anyone call it my “family” name because 国 can hardly be traced back to any family. The first part, Yanyan 艳艳, means gorgeous, beautiful, gaudy, and bright (according to the well-known Chinese dictionary app Pleco.) I have no idea where the name came from, who gave it to me, or which definition they meant for me. The fact that it’s repeated suggests it was just a cute nickname for a baby. That’s the name on all of my Chinese paperwork, and that’s all I’m ever going to get.

I don’t put 国艳艳 in my social media bios because no one ever calls me that. When I say I’ve reclaimed my Chinese name, I really mean that I’m reclaiming an entire heritage that was taken from me and learning a culture I was never a part of.

I have reclaimed 国艳艳 and call it my Chinese name. It’s the Chinese name given to me, and at some point, someone called me it. If anyone asks I tell them 国 is a common name for China and 艳艳 means “colorful” (because that’s my favorite Shinee song.) For my twenty-fourth birthday, I got it tattooed on my wrist because I never learned how to write it and always wanted the reminder. I don’t know a single thing about my birth, my biological parents, any family, or any real connection to China. And yet my name connects me to all that came before. The ambiguity of my name, my past, is the history of China itself; the culture, the policies, the people that created the circumstances that left me, as a baby, at a bus stop in rural Southern China. Like Wen Wu, someone—anyone—had to give me a name to make me a person. And now that name is Lily Rugo.

To learn more about Lily, check out her website: http://lilyrugo.com/

Born of the Land 生于地 - Part 2

 Charlotte with her biological family (surname 严) in Zhenjiang city, Jiangsu province, China, August 2016. Left to right: (Standing) Charlotte's biological 2nd oldest sister, Charlotte, Charlotte's biological younger brother, Charlotte's biological oldest sister (Seated) Charlotte's biological mother, Charlotte's biological niece (baby of her oldest sister), Charlotte's biological father.

In sharing my story of reunion with others, many people have mentioned “fate.” In many ways, I agree with them. How could it not be fate? To search through 1.3 billion people and find the two I was looking for with nothing but a place and a tiny little slip of paper was something akin to impossible. Oh, how I want to believe in fate. 

But, there are places where I feel the word “fate” simply doesn’t fit. Firstly, the character jiang 江  is incredibly common in names, and it is also commonly placed as the second character. That both my family members and I would have jiang 江   as my second character is in fact not so incredible. Perhaps more importantly though, to say it was “fate” is to neglect the role that my own choices played in finding my birth parents. “Fate” implies that I was fated to reunite with my biological parents again in this life without my having to do anything.

In many ways, that did not resonate at all with how I saw my searching journey. In fact, in searching, I felt paradoxically both more in control of my destiny and completely out of control than ever before. It had been my choice to search. I had put those posters up on social media. I had decided to trust that journalist enough. Had I not chosen to search, I would have not found. (*) For one of the first times in my life, I felt that I could make decisions that could dramatically impact the direction my life was taking. 

(*Of course, some of this is completely an illusion. My ability to search in the first place was dictated by the financial resources that my parents offered me.)

Yet my search was also more random than ever. So many factors were completely out of my control. Who was to say that there would be a small slip of paper stuck to the note that was left with me on that day, on which was scribbled the name of the hospital where I was born? Who was to say that the address they left in those hospital records was still their house 22 years later? Who, most importantly, was to say what I would find? It seemed that in this random mass of chaos, I was randomly able to put together an ad hoc path towards reunion. Both this sense of control and randomness indicated to me that there really wasn’t any sort of pattern or entity drawing people inexorably together.

And yet, one moment in my searching journey stands out for me. At one point, we were all sitting in the house of my biological father’s eldest brother  - our family patriarch and my paternal uncle.  My brother was leaning off the faux leather couch dangling a smoke in his hand. My cousin, Yan Jiangmin, the daughter of my biological father’s eldest brother, wore a chic pixie haircut and designer clothing. She looked at my biological brother for a moment, then gazed at me, and said to my brother, “Isn’t it funny? You’ve changed someone’s entire fate.” He shifted his eyes away, laughing softly.

In that moment, I did somehow see my life intertwined with his. We were both born with the hope of being a son. It was just that one of us was, and one of us wasn’t. And in the circumstances we found ourselves, that made all of the difference. 

In the sense that fate is the confluence of individual decisions and the circumstances in which we find ourselves, then I suppose it was fate and it is fate that brings me here. There was a scenario that took place where I did find my biological parents, and there are a million scenarios where I easily could have gone without finding them. But regardless, there was something that connected us, whether or not I chose to pursue it. In that sense, I identify more with the Chinese word  yuan 缘 for a set of intangible ties that draw people together more than I do with the Chinese word  ming 命, which seems to me much more of a harshly dictated version of life, destined to march forward to a teleological outcome no matter the choices we make. 

I see my connection with China in the same way - the junction of choice and circumstance that join together to create an undeniable connection. Even though I reunited with my birth parents, I still feel that, more than I am their child, my tie to my heritage is better understood by seeing me as a child of the land, a child of the river that sustains it. It is as if we are falling together in tandem like drops of a waterfall, like the three drops that make up the river in my name. But I do not think there has to be necessarily only one rigid outcome or one set way for me to connect with China. I have choices at hand. My future with China is mine to name. 

Born of the Land 生于地 - Part 1

Charlotte and her searching / travel companion and Chinese adoptee friend, Willa Kurland, at the airport in Urumqi city, Xinjiang province, China, July 2016.

In China, names are an important marker of belonging. They mark tribal belonging and familial identity, and secure a place within an ancestral past. I came unmoored from all of these. 

At only two months old, I was found on the steps of 315 Nanmen Avenue in the Jingkou district of Zhenjiang, and taken by police to the local Social Welfare Institute (SWI). I had nothing but a small handwritten note stating the date and time of my birth. Like so many other abandoned babies of this time, most of whom were girls, I came under the care of the state. Not only was I without parents or any trace of my background, but I was also without a name.

For babies that arrived without names, common practice for Social Welfare Institutes was to give the surname of the current director, or to choose one of the hundred family surnames within China. For the personal names, the SWI often chose a name related to the location in which the child was found. In this way, as children uprooted from the identity of family, we were branded children of the land.

My Chinese name is  Zhou Jiangwen 周江雯. The second character of my Chinese name is jiang 江. In Chinese, jiang 江  means river, three tumbling droplets, descending like a waterfall. In some ways, it may be just a common element incorporated into mine as it is into so many Chinese names. But for me, it is also an indelible stamp of the land from which I come. It may come from the name of the city in which I was born - Zhenjiang 镇江. Or perhaps the name of my province Jiangsu 江苏.

It may even be a homage to the proximity of my birth city to one of the longest rivers in the world. As it turns out, jiang 江 is the second character of what the Chinese call the Yangtze - Changjiang 长江, literally “long river.” Rivers have long occupied a mythological status for the people whose lands and minds are touched by them. The people of Jiangsu 江苏 province are no exception. By the time the river snakes through the province, it has traveled the great majority of its thousands of miles journey from the highlands of Tibet to its terminal stretch, finally preparing to yawn into the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. As the Changjiang 长江 passes through each city, its fate intertwines with each individual whose life it touches. At the same time, the lives of each individual are woven intricately into the river’s body. Since I too was touched by the river, it would be fitting for my name to echo this grand body of water.

And so I too thought of myself for so many years - someone destined to be a child of the land where I was born. There was a blank spot where there should have been a beginning to my story, a question mark where there should have been the names and images of my biological parents. I wondered about them often, but with no concrete information to tie me to them, I felt that in many ways I was more of a child of the land that I so often romanticized about - China. Because of this, I felt a distinct pull to learn about this mythical land. I dedicated myself to learning about the history, culture, and language of China.

I often wondered, if I found my biological family, whether I would change my Chinese name. Over the course of 11 years of using the name given to me in the orphanage in Chinese classes and settings, I had grown rather fond of it. My name became a way for me to forge a second identity, a way to come into being in another self. In Chinese class, I could become Zhou Jiangwen 周江雯, someone with more of a connection to the land of my birth than the Charlotte Cotter who grew up in the suburbs of Boston her whole life. Without realizing it, my name had already taken on something of a special meaning for me.

In the summer of 2016, I was able to locate my biological family in China. It turned out that I needn’t worry about whether or not to change my Chinese name. When I found my family, one of the first questions I asked was whether they had given me a name before they gave me away. They said, no, they had not. 

My parents were still together, and still living in Jiangsu Province. At the time that they gave birth to me, they were involved in agricultural work and lived in a mud-hut in Huai’an 淮安,  China, a city about three hours drive from Zhenjiang 镇江. Today, they’re migrant workers, floating from city to city to find itinerant labor. I  have two older sisters and a brother, exactly one year younger than me. My family surname was Yan 严. 

But it was the name of the girls in the family that first caught my attention. My eldest sister’s name is Yan Jiangli 严江丽 , and my second sister’s name is Yan Jiangping 严江萍 . I have cousins Yan Jiangyan 严江妍  and Yan Jiangmin 严江民 . In Chinese families, it is common to have a family-wide naming practice, such as naming each brother with the number of their birth, one, two, three, and so-on. In the Yan 严 family, each daughter born is given the same second character - jiang 江 - the character for river. And so it became that I,  the so-called “lost and now re-found daughter,” Zhou Jiangwen周江雯 ,  seemed to fit right in. “What a funny coincidence! It must be fate,” they said. “No need to change your Chinese name,” they said. “Just change your last name to Yan 严,” they said. As if it were that simple.