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.
