Here’s something I do: In my cell phone contacts, I list people’s full names out like a government spreadsheet — an Alexander James Messersmith or Gunnar Bjarne Gunderson instead of what I’ve been informed of as more normal variations. I started doing this for my close friends a while ago because I felt inexplicably drawn to it, in a way I didn’t know how to describe, but lately it’s been everyone. If you start scrolling through, it’s a sea of Praveens, Briannes, Ryans and a darrin — uncapitalized — only punctuated with my first name and my phone number and my birthday just in case I forget those things about myself, and suddenly I’m back in my old bedroom and someone leans against my bed frame and whispers, “Tianyu, Tianyu, Tianyu,” over and over again like he’s chanting a mantra, trying to will something into existence.
It’s not right, I say. 天宇。At the moment, I was frustrated, but I don’t blame him now because a native language alters your phonetic perception: If you grew up speaking English, it might be impossible for you to distinguish between intonational differences in other languages if the phonemes aren’t distinct within the English lexicon, especially in a tonal language such as Chinese, and especially if your Chinese and legal name, Tiānyǚ, has the sixth vowel that native-English speakers can’t distinguish. Especially if you felt so much shame because of people not being able to pronounce it that you went by darrin instead.
Still, I like the name. Someone told me once the “r”s in its midst divided the name nicely, redirecting it in the mouth — a sort of realignment. “Rebirth,” she said, “it fits you well.” I think that if I want to be reborn I’d go with a name like Phoenix, but she said that was too on-the-nose, and I didn’t seem like a nosy person. I also like the “r”s, but sometimes I think I ought to have a name with more wildness, like Jasper or Damian, or maybe a name with an e in it, because “e”s in English reverberate in the back of your mouth nicely, serenely — deep, like sapphires, which makes everything more confusing because the most common letter in English is e, yet English is such an ugly language. I think it’s the consonants, stuttering, getting in the way of your tongue.
Regardless, I have a Chinese name and it means something. Names in China are important: We have namesetters, fortune tellers who come to you when you are born, read your birthright and give you a name that will ensure cosmic balance — a fire radical for when the stars when you were born have too much water, for example. People pay good money for this — anything for their children to be ahead, to have a good life. But I never did get professionally named because dad didn’t believe in it — hard to believe in futures like this when you live through the cultural revolution — although he still chose with intention. 天 means sky, and because I was born in the year of the horse it suggests I am a pegasus — 天马 — and that I am supposed to fly and be free. 宇, on the other hand, is an awfully big word, meaning the universe, the stars, the cosmological first in the order of things. It’s an awfully big word for a kid, and my grandfather knew this and disapproved, telling my father this will put too much pressure on the child, 宇 will crush him whole. But I think dad knew the sky was falling in Beijing and this was how he chose to reconcile with it. He wanted to give me freedom, and maybe that is the moment when he knew we were moving to America—
“I’m not sure I understand,” he says, still leaning against my bed frame, sinking down. We’d given up on trying to pronounce my name — his little obsession for the summer night. Although he was only trying to be a good friend and was also stubborn in that uniquely American way (like how I’m sad in that uniquely Chinese American way) and Maybe, just maybe, if someone would call me by my name, I start saying, if someone in America would brush their hand against my chin where that old scar lies and would say, “我想你，天宇,” then maybe all of this would be truly, resoundingly okay,
then I wouldn’t be so goddamn fucking lonely anymore, then maybe dad was right and if you say my name like it’s real in this language and say it like it exists, like I exist, then maybe I could grow wings like a pegasus and finally fly and have that freedom he wanted for me.
Of course, I don’t bother to articulate this because my cognitive science professor taught me your native language alters your phonetic perception, and sometimes people can’t understand you.
***
Would I get in trouble if I said English is an ideological state apparatus? That English, like other forms of soft power, fundamentally answers to the state? You can’t deny films and television and the news will push a national narrative, an American set of beliefs and ideals towards us — for chrissake, it’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, it’s “One Hundred and Thirty-two Years of Editorial Freedom” — those words, stubborn in that uniquely American way. And I’m not saying this is negative but merely that this happens, and we’re not neutral institutions, but American institutions. And maybe English doesn’t stand for anything in this sense, but it erases, amnesizes, carves you out whole until you are hollow.
“For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?”
Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”
In the act of going by darrin, the act of making myself understandable to English, I lose something unnameable. I lose what cannot be translated, because while you can get semantic meaning across, it is unfathomably hard to communicate aesthetics, elegance. It’s unfathomably hard to really show how gorgeous something is, to show how pure Chinese feels on a tongue — how a Chinese name rolls into those places in my throat that it never reaches in English, and how right that feels, and how much of a hole it leaves in me when it’s gone — how much of a footprint it leaves, with one leg in America and another in Asia, you are stuck in a perpetual place, a quantum entanglement in between citizenships, cultures, families, names — feelings.
You are stuck not knowing how to feel grief, in a cycle of melancholia because you don’t know what you’ve lost, because English can’t articulate it. And if you are stuck with this language, then a part of yourself becomes alien to you. And if we all have 断的骨头, and we can’t help each other, and 我们 each have to 自己找我们的 way down this 山顶， 下到一个 nice and pleasant 的地方，我们可以生活的地方？Well, 着建议每个人都会成功, and 很多人一生中都下不了山。
Sorry. I forget. Your native language alters your phonetic perception, and sometimes people can’t 动你。
***
I’ve had people ask me, “Why don’t you just go by 天宇 if you feel so strongly about it?” And a part of me does want to go by my name again and to make it the world’s problem. But I also know that people can pronounce darrin, and when you have a pronounceable name you have a more visible name, a more memorable name, and if people remember your name people remember you — and, god, beyond any and all political theory, beyond whatever I stand for, I think we all just want to feel seen.
For a while, I desperately wanted to do like Lahiri, to surrender myself into a mother tongue and feel its warm embrace, because I hate that I write well in English. I hate that I feel like I am losing a part of myself with every article I pen, parts I will never be able to recover; I feel like a traitor, an hourglass dripping down with each word on the page until English makes me nothing. And, okay, maybe I am not proficient in Chinese yet, but I don’t doubt I can learn,
and I hate that I know I can fly, but you can never, never watch me be free.
Maybe this is the Asian American condition: Beyond any stories of found belonging, any “I had too many white people around me in high school but I found my true friends in college,” it is about unresolved grief. And if that’s true, well, then beyond the sadness it implies is all the funny, beautiful ways we deal with it, like filling phone contacts with middle names. And to my friends — the Ravis, Denises, Davids, Brandons, Kellys, Macys and Amirs: This is my act of memory to you. Even if I never make it down the mountain, I can still listen, and this piece is for your grandfathers and grandmothers, their nicknames, the streets your mothers grew up on and your father’s childhood pets and every little gorgeous thing about living in between, because while I miss knowing a world with 天宇 in it, that has never meant Darrin wasn’t beautiful.
Summer Digital Managing Editor and Statement Contributor Darrin Zhou can be reached at darrinz@umich.edu