What's in a Name

Last week, I guest lectured for a class at CPA, the school where I once taught art.  I told part of our adoption story.  In setting it up, I recalled a pivotal moment, and the telling hit me hard, taking my breath.  That moment, still fresh, reminds me why ancient people erected monuments and crafted holidays and how doing so (albeit in a different manner) on a familial or community level is important to our evolution--and to our human-ness.  It's a way of bearing witness.  I have no obelisk or ebenezer, but I do have a blog, and it will do.

We've been asked many times why we chose to keep our sons' Chinese names.  Most of our friends who adopt give their children an Anglo first name and incorporate their Chinese name as a middle name.  I've heard that within larger orphanages, a child's name is fairly inconsequential.  The surname is often determined by location; all children from a certain orphanage in Henan province, for instance, have the surname "Luo."  The surname comes first in Chinese nomenclature.  The given name is second and is often simple, chosen at random and often quickly.  There is a custom within part of the international adoption community of celebrating a child's new name as a metaphor for redemption within the Christian tradition; a new believer is "adopted" as a child of God by way of her faith in His son, Jesus, a process which changes her name and transforms her identity, thus physical adoption is likewise marked.

For us, it was always Tian You and FuXia, though the spelling of YoYo's full name changed from "You" to "Yo," for ease of pronunciation in America.  Changing our sons' names was never an option, for many reasons.  The biggest reason, though, was set in my heart the same day that I was changed and made open to Special Needs adoption.

It would seem that we visited the Hope Healing Home in Beijing by chance.  We traveled to China for the first time in spring of 2006, and in the course of touring several provinces and learning much about Chinese art and history, our host asked if we would mind accompanying him to the Healing Home one day.  He had an errand to run, and he was not often in Beijing.  We agreed, and within a few hours, we'd made the ride through the outskirts of the city to the moment that would change our lives forever.  I was set against Waiting Child adoption, and when our caseworker asked us just a week prior to this trip to consider WC adoption, I defied God to change my mind.  As far as I was concerned, we were on the path to adopting a healthy baby girl from China.

We walked into a building that reminded me of my old high school, a two-story structure with a hall flanked on either side by classrooms--or in this case, playrooms, bedrooms, and kitchen.  I was intrigued by the goings-on of a medical foster home but detached.  I don't think this was deliberate on my part; the visit didn't have anything to do with the rest of our trip, and so I was just an onlooker touring a facility, interested only because of the relationship this organization had with one we had supported financially in years past.  So it seemed.

What I saw was children with clubbed feet, cleft palates, Down syndrome, heart defects, exstrophy, hepatitis--there was a wide range--playing together in bright well-appointed playrooms with cheerful murals and an eye towards Montessori theory.  We rounded a corner into a large communal bathroom with several sinks and changing stations.  Each sink was dedicated to one group of children, with each child's washcloth and toothbrush on a hanger nearby.  Each washcloth was stitched with a name in red thread.  I caught my breath and asked why.

The director, a pediatric surgeon from Australia, had stitched the children's names on the washcloths...because their names were the one thing under the sun that they owned.  God knew their names before they were born, she went on, and to have and own that name, to use it to mark something as one's own, was lifegiving.  In giving them that ownership, she was bearing witness to each child's dignity, arguably for the first time in their short lives.  She was teaching them how to be people.

Six months later, we learned the name of our first son, and not long after, we learned that his name, meaning "Heaven Protect," or "God bless," was prayed over him when he was but five days old, as his ayis sped him to the hospital and willed him to live.  It was both cry of hope and last rite.  And he lived.  So his name remains.

We learned some time later that FuXia had been called Jian Gong for many years.  Perhaps it was a nickname.  But when he began to be called FuXia, he excitedly told his friends at the Montessori school he attended that it was his brand new "American name."  It means "Happy Summer."  Happy was the day that summer we decided that we could not live any longer without FuXia as a son.  His name, too, remains.

Both boys know that they may change or abbreviate their name to sound more American, should they so choose, someday.  Secretly, I hope they don't change them.  For me, the keeping of their names is bearing witness to every single day that God cared for them when I did not know they were even alive. Before I mothered them or gave a thought to their well-being, they survived against impossible odds.  Keeping their names is a small way, and also an unsmall way, to honor and respect the places from which they have come and the long road each has traveled to become our son.