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

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/