names

I’m not sure which is harder: watching someone age daily, waking up one day and realizing mortality or having been away for years seeing a person you hardly recognize. This summer I spent about 10 days in California with my maternal grandparents. Neither are doing well. My grandmother is so weak physically she can’t even stand or sit up on her own, but she has all her mental faculties while my grandfather is strong physically but doesn’t recognize his own son. I spent many hours during that trip learning the meaning of forbearance and long-suffering by sitting in a room with my grandfather and having the same conversation with him. He always wanted to tell me about his schooling background and want to hear about mine. He wouldn’t stop talking about Pyongyang, North Korea, his hometown. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him the latest news about that particular country. Some forgetting is merciful. Soon, we figured out that my grandpa communicated a lot better when I wrote things down for him. And one day it dawned on me that soon we might not even have that anymore so I seized the moment and asked him to write my name in Chinese characters for me.

Koreans name their babies using Chinese characters and then convert them to Korean phonetics. Unfortunately, my dad was a fan of going renegade and decided to name me using Korean phonetics and my relatives had to frantically search for Chinese characters that sounded phonetically similar but still retained the original meaning of mine name: Ji Na. Luckily, there are a lot of Chinese characters. A lot.

But though he made his inlaws and older brothers hate him for a couple of weeks, I’m glad that I’m named non-traditionally.

Names should have stories. One of my favorite living writers is Jhumpa Lahiri. Her book of short stories Interpreter of Maladies is probably the only collection of short stories I’ve read continuously without feeling overwhelmed (there’s something about short story collections that overwhelm me; can’t quite put my finger on it…). I once wrote a term paper on her first novel, The Namesake (now a movie, but I haven’t had the heart to watch it yet). The family in the book is from the northern region of India (I want to say they are Bengali) and apparently it is a custom among some there to give their children two names. One as a formal name for the birth certificate and one given much later after they are born to reflect their personality and habits.  I learned from that book to avoid flippancy with names.

Sometimes I wonder if it is a good thing for a child to have many names. And I mean functional names, not like those royal wannabes who give their children like 40 middle names but never use any of them. I have always had two names. Korean. American. And I go from one to the other in one fluid motion without a single thought. Is it good to answer to many names or just to one?