Her first day of primary school began with an English lesson. She, along with dozens of other schoolkids, sat in rows after rows of hard wooden chairs with “name tags” - folded cardboard triangles with names written on them - placed on the desks in front of them. After the teacher had greeted the class the pupils were asked to introduce themselves one by one. When it was her turn she was so excited from babbling on about her hobbies that only as the teacher gently reminded her did she realise that she had forgotten to state her name.
“So what’s your name?”
“I’m Zhang Muyang.” she replied, pointing at her name tag.
“Do you have an English name, Muyang?” asked the teacher, “in English classes we use English names.”
She stared blankly at the teacher and shook her head. Since her birth her parents had opted not to address her with any nickname or diminutive names, hence the concept of an alternative combination of syllables to which she could be referred was entirely alien to her. Sensing her confusion, the teacher broke the awkward silence: “Don’t worry, I’ll give English names to anyone who doesn’t have one. As for you - how about Celina? It’s a nice name, and I’m sure you’ll like it.”
She sat down, still somewhat bewildered. Her six-year-old mind reckoned that no one with dark eyes and dark hair like her own, born and raised on this land populated by those with such eyes and such hair, would be given by their parents a name like “Celina”. “Celina”, like other names she could hear her teacher randomly handing out to pupils, sounds exotic and intriguing, the kind of names she often saw in English books for young learners in bookstores her mother brought her to. More intriguing is the fact that she got to own such a name because of, and during, English lessons.
“Now, here are your new name tags with your English names written on them,” the teacher walked up to her seat and placed a piece of folded cardboard with “Celina” written on it, “from now on I want you to bring them to English class, rather than the ones with your Chinese names.”
When she exited the elevator and walked towards her apartment that afternoon after school she could hear people talking and laughing long before she reached the door. As she twisted her key and opened the door she saw her mother sitting at the coffee table chatting with their neighbour, Miss Gao. This Miss Gao was someone she had looked up to for as long as she could remember, as her mother often said that she studied in a faraway place, a different country known as the USA, doing a master’s degree in finance whatsoever. Neither a master’s degree nor finance did she have any idea of; all that mattered to her was that Miss Gao spent most of her time in that faraway USA and only came back for holidays, with abundant treats for her and abundant tales for her family.
“Long time no see, Muyang!” Miss Gao exclaimed as she rushed to hug the girl, “how was your first day at school?”
She related her day as much as possible. When she got to the English name part she looked at Miss Gao and asked her quizzically: “Why do we need English names? Don’t we already have Chinese names?”
“We need English names, my dear,” Miss Gao lifted the girl onto her lap and made herself comfortable on the sofa, “because we need to blend in. Right now I’m studying in the USA and I’m sure you and a lot of your classmates will also end up studying abroad someday. Yes, we do have Chinese names, but they are difficult for English-speaking people to pronounce and understand. Now, Muyang, do you know what your name means?”
“My mom had told me,” she searched her mind, “that it means ‘basked in sunlight’.”
“Very good, but the Americans and the British and the Canadians and all those who don’t speak our language would not understand it - all they know is that they couldn’t figure out our names, and that our names are strange. This is why we need English names. Without them, we will forever be regarded as a bunch of people as strange as our names, and this strangeness is gonna occupy every single inch of space between us and them. No space for understanding, or respect, or communication. For them to happen, we need English names.”
Muyang hopped off Miss Gao’s lap before the guest stood up and got ready to leave. After bidding good night Miss Gao grinned at Muyang and said, in her usual cheery tone, “See you, Celina.”
She went into her room, took out her name tags - both Chinese and English - and placed them side by side on her desk. Then she pulled out the books she received during the day one by one and started writing her name on them. When she got to her English book she put down her surname “Zhang” first, and instead of adding “Muyang” after it, as she did with all her other books, she added “Celina” before it.
She went through her primary school years excelling in pretty much every subject, especially English. She was the favourite student of all her English teachers, and the medals and trophies she brought home from her English competitions overtook her entire childhood bookshelves. Before she knew it everyone was calling her Celina - not just her English teachers, not just during English lessons, but all her friends and acquaintances on all occasions were calling her by that exotic and intriguing name handed out to her on her first day of school.
Occasionally she would flip through her English coursebooks, stare at the white, blond, blue-eyed characters having conversations in perfect grammar, and wonder where the “blending in” process, in Miss Gao’s words, ends. Does it end with the adoption of a name not given by one’s parents, one’s lineage, one’s culture? Does it end with changing one’s appearance in the same arbitrary manner as changing one’s name, in an attempt to look like them? Or does it never end? Could it be that by telling her about blending in using an English name, Miss Gao had been uttering a wish which had always been a wish after all?
During the summer after graduating from primary school she got the opportunity to compete in an English-speaking contest abroad, in the USA. Thrilled, she packed her bags and boarded the plane to that mystical land along with other fellow contestants. Everything went amazingly well for her until she reached the final round, after three days of speeches and debating where schoolkids from all across China showed off their English abilities by all means possible. During her last minutes on stage, after being bombarded by miscellaneous questions from several judges, all being “foreigners” like the figures in her coursebooks, one judge piped up: “It just occurred to me that I’ve forgotten to ask your name - sorry, what’s your name?”
“Celina.”
“No, no,” the judge replied, “I mean your Chinese name, your - your actual name.”
“That doesn’t matter.” she blurted out before realising what she had just said, struggling to conceal her aghast at her own words. Though gradually allowing her English name to devour her Chinese name, before that moment she had regarded her affection towards them to be the same, just as parents claim to love all their children equally. She had traced with such care her Chinese name with a brush in calligraphy lessons, and just like calligraphy paper that always sat silently at the back of all creations, so did her Chinese name, the base of everything. And there she was, telling a foreigner that her “actual” name did not matter.
“It’s okay,” the judge thankfully did not embarrass her, “can you tell me what ‘Celina’ means, then?”
She stammered, reddened, but came up with nothing. Before long her time on stage was over and she was told to return to her seat and wait for the results. Sitting among the audience downstage she thought about her name “Muyang”, and that it meant “basked in sunlight”. She thought about reading about how to cook English breakfast in English lessons, before going home and making dumplings with her mother. She thought about what Miss Gao told her when she was sitting on her lap, about how foreigners would feel “strange” at Chinese names. She thought about how she, and countless others, had disregarded who they were to be who they were not, and how that sounded stranger than Miss Gao’s words.
She had gone to the USA as both Muyang and Celina, yet returned home as only Muyang. The first thing she did after entering her room was to dig out the name tag with “Celina” on it and toss it into the trash. She rummaged through all her books and notebooks and erased “Celina” whenever she caught sight of it. She went to great lengths correcting anyone who attempted to address her as Celina, to which she had never had the slightest objection before. When asked about the reason for her transformation she refused to say more than a few sentences, often along the lines of “I don’t want to contribute anymore to the narrative that our names are inferior to others’ names”.
In middle school, and later high school, she was no longer a top student, but she still did much better in English than everyone else, and it had been the topic of much discussion why she did not opt for an English name like her schoolmates who, somehow, held this idea that doing so would improve their English grades. When she started her attempts as a creative writer she obtained the reputation of “that English genius who only posts in Chinese”, stubbornly refusing to publicize any of her English works no matter how well-written they were.
During a sociology class in Year 11 the topic discussed was “globalisation”. As the teacher put on the board terms such as pop culture, “McDonaldisation” and lingua franca, she raised her hand and asked the teacher how, in that case, globalisation was different from westernisation. The teacher admitted that he had no answer to that yet.
Then, a couple of months after her eighteenth birthday, she found herself on a plane to the USA again, this time for university. When a South Asian boy next to her spoke to her in their first tutorial together she chatted happily with him. “I’m Muyang from China.”, she said.
“Nice to meet you!” the boy replied, “May I ask what ‘Muyang’ means in Chinese?”
“Of course! It means ‘basked in sunlight’. Now what’s your name?”
“I’m Sudhir,” said the boy, “My parents are from India and I grew up in America. I also go by Sam.”
Somehow the words “I also go by” struck her. “So people call you both Sudhir and Sam?” she managed to sound calm.
“Yeah,” the boy was smiling the warmest smile she had seen in a while, “People call me either Sudhir or Sam - depending on how they feel since I’m comfortable with both.”
“Don’t you feel......strange? Or don’t they?”
“No! Neither of them is too strange for me or them. I regard both as who I am - in this way everyone is respected.”
For the first time in years she was at a loss of words regarding this topic. Before her silence became suspicious she turned to Sudhir, or Sam, again: “Do you, um, happen to know what the name ‘Celina’ means?”
“I guess I do - it means ‘heavenly’. Or ‘moonlight’.”
Looking at her Sudhir smiled again: “Do you go by Celina as well? What do you want me to call you? Do you want to bask in moonlight -” he giggled heartily, “- or sunlight?”
She sat there dumbstruck. It hit her that for all these years everyone, including herself, was telling her why she should go by Celina, or why she should not; never had anyone asked her what she wished to go by. Too much had been said about who she ought to be, too little about who she wished to be.
“I’d rather bask in sunlight,” she reached out her hand, “Sudhir.”
After graduating from university with a degree in English she returned to the city she was born and raised in, much to her parents’ dismay as they wanted her to stay in the USA, and took up the job of an English teacher. On the first day of the new school year, she introduced herself to the class in a professional, passionate manner: “Hello students, I’ll be your English teacher. My name -” she picked up a chalk and wrote down her name, in Chinese characters, on the blackboard, “- is Zhang Muyang, and you can call me Miss Zhang. In case you’re wondering, ‘Muyang’ means ‘basked in sunlight’.”
“But, Miss Zhang,” a girl in the corner raised her hand timidly, “Don’t you have an English name?”
“Why?” she smiled and asked the class, “Why do you think I have an English name?”
“Because, because -” several hands shot up at the same time, “- Because we need to study abroad!”
“Yes, indeed some of you may eventually study abroad, but you can do that without an English name,” she turned her gaze momentarily from the classroom to the windowsill, where the early September sunlight beamed splendidly, “because Chinese names and English names are equally beautiful. Now, does anyone want an English name so that they can become twice as amazing as they already are?”
The who class raised their hand, and laughter echoed in the crisp morning air.
