In the garden
When will they invent a machine to tell me who I am? — Jacques Henri Lartigue
In Chinese tradition, each member of the same generation will share one character in their given names. The way in which this was usually determined was through a generational or family poem, and each successive character in the poem would be taken as one character of the given name for each successive generation. Families or clans would hire a scholar to compose the poem for them, and it would often be written in a village genealogy book. The poems would usually be around 32 characters in length on how the clan needs to be virtuous.
I don’t recall when I first learned of this — perhaps around the time when, as a child, I noticed that the names of my father and each of his nine siblings seemed to begin with the same character. I then noticed that my mother’s four birth siblings I took a look at the only comparable situation I knew, and, based on the fact that my brother and I had entirely different names, conjectured that something was strange.
Dad’s side
My father’s generation has the generational name of 仰 (yǎng), which means something along the lines of “raising” or “to look up”, both physically in facing upwards or in looking up to someone in admiration or reverence. Each of his siblings’ names begins with 仰 and is accompanied by a second given name. My father’s given name is 仰貴 (yǎng guì), which means “to raise wealth” or “to face, or to look (up) to wealth”, and each of his brothers and sisters’ names follow the “仰 + x” formula.
My grandfather’s given name began with 欽 (qīn). This character means “admiration, respect, royalty”. When put together with my father’s generational name, the two combine to become 欽仰 (qīn yǎng), a verb meaning “to revere, venerate, or esteem”. It isn’t until I learn that this archive of generational names is a poem, not a list, that I think to do this. I begin to understand that what I hold is a piece of the poem.
In an interview with Ramona Koval, John Berger touches briefly on “atavistic or genetic memory” in his description of how he had a strange feeling of strong familiarity with the small details of daily life in Eastern Europe when he first visited, though he had never seen them before. It turned out that his father’s side hailed from Trieste, on the edge of Italy and Slovenia. Times like these, I wish atavistic memory, if it is true, were true enough to download or intuit this kind of information directly. I think so often about what we cannot remember, what we could not have even hoped to capture at the time — the lived experience of a person, the peculiar emotions, the unnameable sensations, the joy, the leaden sadness. All the things that sit behind the pictures I have of names on graves.
Mum’s side, and a note on the maternal line
In a forced adoption, my great-grandmother forced her younger son to give up his fifth-born child to his older brother, who remained childless at the time. That fifth-born child was my mother. Her adoptive father (who was also her paternal uncle) was literary in his leanings, and he dispensed with tradition to give her a name with the meaning: “dreaming flower”. Beautiful, but adrift. I do know, however, that her birth sisters and brothers all have names beginning with a character named “teck” in their local dialect.**
The generation before her likely had the generational of 玉 (yù). My mother’s adoptive father was also her paternal uncle — the given names of both brothers begin with that character, 玉 (yù), which means “jade”.
I know nothing of my great-grandfather, who was a lorry driver and died fairly young in an accident. It was then that my great-grandmother made her oldest son, my mother’s adoptive father, take on her surname so it would live on.
Everything flows patrilineal in Chinese culture. My parents each know little about their mothers and where their families come from.
My generation
My parents didn’t follow this tradition with my brother and me, largely because Dad had no idea what our generational name was meant to be. The only thing he remembered was that his mother once had a small book with a worn, red cover that she had taken with her from their village in Liyang in the Chinese province of Guangdong. I have made a leap of the imagination to speculate that that may have been a copy of the village genealogy book. Where it is now, we don’t know, but Dad conjectured that his oldest siblings would either know where the book was or know the next piece of poem.
Like many things of this ilk, we never get around to it until it’s too late. Earlier this year, two of my Dad’s brothers died in rapid succession. The first one’s heart gave out while playing futsal in the sun. Not more than two months later, the second one died of heatstroke after mowing grass on a particularly hot day. This second one was the third born in the family, and it was in his death notice that I saw his sons each had the same first character in their given names: 園 (yuán), which means “garden”.
As of writing this, I haven’t managed to confirm whether this is my generational name as written, perhaps, in my grandmother’s red book. But part of me almost doesn’t wish to know because I want to adopt 園 (yuán) as the name for my generation whether or not it really is. As I’ve written before, I constantly find myself circling around and taking images of plants and gardening. 園 (yuán) means “garden”. And placing it after 欽仰 (qīnyǎng) makes that small fragment means “to venerate or revere (the) garden”. I don’t know what the next word is, and the nature of Chinese is such that it might dramatically alter this fragment of meaning I have devised for myself, if it is even truly part of the original poem.
** This is in the Heng Hua dialect, and I don’t know the Mandarin equivalent so have been unable to find the character or meaning through online sources. Every question I have requires extensive consultation via WhatsApp of family members who aren’t themselves entirely sure of the provenance of their histories. Unfortunately, most of what I find out ends up being by way of gravestones.