The characters Mao chose for his first son, An Ying, challenged the Confucian ideals propagated by his family’s poem. Individually, the characters An and Ying respectively meant “the bank of the river” and “hero,” but interpreted through the lens of communism, the name became “The Hero Who Reaches the Shore of Socialism.” Mao scrapped the generation poem, but he didn’t toss out generation names altogether. He would later give three other sons names beginning with the character An, but Mao, a critic of patriarchal practices, would not give this generation name to any of his four daughters.
Bah Ba also didn’t abandon generation names when he named me and my brother, but like Mao, Bah Ba didn’t give his daughter this name. To be fair, Bah Ba couldn’t. The character in my Chinese name that I share with Goh Goh is the male identifier, Saang. Atypical was Bah Ba’s choice to place our generation name as the second character of our given name and not our first. The character rests at the end of my name. Detached from verse. No claims to a clan. No grand instructions to descendants. Only a bond between brothers. The desire of a young father to keep his family whole.
rank
I leafed through the dictionary for a new graffiti tag, a name I’d choose myself. I began with aardvark and ended with zymurgy. I’d borrowed the idea from Malcolm X. To teach himself how to read and write, he copied the entire dictionary by hand in prison, back when he was still Malcolm Little.
I skipped over any word with more than five letters. Long words were a luxury of time we didn’t have. Skipped the definitions too. We prided ourselves as writers, but it wasn’t words that we loved. It was letters, how they looked, the way an S meandered. The letters of my name, O-U-T, were stiff and uptight, wallflowers. I needed letters that danced and jabbed.
Because of its sharp angles, its final letter punching and kicking, I renamed myself: RANK.
mask
Dik Ching commanded an army of thirty thousand men and thirty generals. He’d ride into battle wearing a bronze mask. Combined with his long hair, unkempt and billowing in the wind, the bronze mask sent enemy soldiers scurrying. They didn’t see a man charging at them, but a demon.
Dik’s motivation behind wearing the mask, however, wasn’t solely to scare the enemy. It also hid the tattoo on his face, the reminder that he was less than. With the bronze mask, Dik discarded his past and became a deity.
poor and blank
“…the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank.’ This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.”
—mao zedong
malcolm
Malcolm Little was his birth name, Little from his father. Detroit Red was his street name, red for the color of his hair, inherited from his maternal grandfather, a Scot. “Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! ” Malcolm said after he shed his street name. “If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me!”
Malcolm X was his converted name, the X replacing the Little, the unknown erasing the scar. El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz was the name he created for himself, the el-Hajj for his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malik for Malcolm, el-Shabazz as in the Lost Tribe of Shabazz. His new surname expressed not just his love for his people, the lost children of Africa, but Shabazz was also a solution to the unknown, an answer for the variable, a name that could be passed on to his children and handed down successive generations, an invented name but a pure one.
manny lee
My mother, like me, was fifteen when she named herself. She chose Maggie for her English name. When she married my father, she married into the Lam family, but, as customary, kept her maiden name. She remained Maggie Lee, but she wasn’t thrilled with her name. Maggie, she learned, was all too common.
My mom would later find a nickname, thanks to ’Dullah’s baby sister. She’d mispronounce my mom’s name as Manny. All the kids on our side of the projects also called my mother this. It was a requirement. She’d tempt them with candy like an evil witch. She’d leave our door open, and in plain sight on the kitchen table was a gumball dispenser.
When a kid stopped at our door, my mom, with her makeup on—she never opened the door without it—would grab a gumball, show it to the kid then hide it behind her back. To get the candy, the kid would have to say my mom’s full name: Manny Lee. The kids would sit at our doorstep, and this would be the highlight of my mother’s day.
The first time she tried to get my homeboys to call her Manny Lee, I told her, “The name’s dumb. Manny Lee is a Dominican shortstop for the Blue Jays.”
“Me, I don’t care,” she said.
邦強 strong as a nation
My father renamed himself when he married my mother. The second name wouldn’t stick, something he tried out, then abandoned.
Chinese folks accumulated names over a lifetime. At birth you were given a nickname, a “milk name.” A month or so later you received your given name. When you started school, your teacher gave you a name to be used just in school, a “book name.” If you’re counting, that’s three names by age six. Upon marriage, you took on an “adult name.” Later in life, you’d also have a formal nickname. If you were an artist,
