One of my earliest memories is from elementary school when my friends had wanted to know what my Chinese name was. When I finally told them at recess one day, they ran in circles around me, laughing and singing the theme song of a TV show that had been popular on Toon Disney at the time, "Yin Yang Yo!"
Kids will be kids, and I understand the connection between my Chinese name and that TV show, but it’s not just children who have taken my birth name and twisted into something to laugh about. Even as a young adult, I have had to brush off the fact that hearing my birth name causes people to laugh about it or repeat it multiple time, not only incorrectly, but in a tone that belies their amusement at such a “weird” name.
Names are a funny thing. To have one is to have an identity. Each name you accumulate marks acceptance by others into different aspects of your life. And yet each name accumulated is the chance to build on one's identity. I think people are multifaceted, and the core of who we are never changes, but with each name, perhaps, a new part of our identity emerges.
My full name is Amelia Ying Lawrence Williams.
I think my first name might have been a tribute to my adopted father’s birth mother, but I don’t really know. I never knew anything about her, let alone her name, Amelia Lawrence, until fairly recently.
My first middle name is a shortened version of my Chinese name, Yue Ying Ying. My second middle name used to be my last name until my mother remarried and I opted to shift my adopted father’s last name to the middle of my name. My last name is my step-father’s, and my sister and I chose to assume it when my mother did.
Most friends growing up in New Hampshire called me Mel. My friends at my high school in Salem, Oregon called me Amalia, what they called their Spanish version of my name. My freshman year of college I went by Mia, due to the fact that there were three Amelias living on my floor. The friends I made as a summer camp counselor call me by my camp name, Fruit Loop, shortened by most to Froopy. And now among my roommates in our apartment, I am called MiMi.
So much importance is put on a person’s name. It gives us an identity. It defines who we are. And yet I have never felt that connected to one name. I have been called so many names over the years, and while I have responded to each as if were my own, I have never felt firm conviction toward anyone of them as my “one true name.”
Maybe it stems from the fact that even as a kid, my name was something that was questioned. As an adoptee, I have gone my whole like answering questions about where I’m from and “how I like it in America.” But I think the most uncomfortable question that I have had to deal with time and again is the question that comes in response to my name, “no but what is your real name?”
Even though I don’t feel as if one name defines everything that I am as a person, I like Amelia. And to say that Yue Ying Ying is my real name is to imply that Amelia is my fake name.
I might not have been born Amelia Ying Lawrence Williams, an American citizen. But I grew up as her.
I am her.
