When will they invent a machine to tell me who I am?
— Jacques Henri Lartigue
In traditions that once existed, and perhaps still exist, in rural Southern China, 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 the virtues of the clan.
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 not as it should be.
A note on language
The characters I use here are traditional Chinese because this is the Chinese that was prevalent in Malaysia during my parents’ time and remains in the texts that I have seen, although I understand that simplified Chinese is now taught in schools and is increasingly widespread.
There is also the additional challenge of spoken versus written language. My family comes from a variety of dialect groups and they are named in their own dialects. Those who do speak Mandarin Chinese were taught in school or picked it up later in life. Chinese is unusual in that the written characters remain the same across dialects but the spoken versions can be mutually unintelligible — I am told that my father’s father would pick up a newspaper written in traditional Chinese and read it out in their dialect, Teochew. There is no chance that someone who speaks Teochew can understand any spoken Mandarin.
I use Mandarin here for the sake of consistency and because there are extensive resources for it online, where the resources for dialects such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Foochow are scarce, if not nonexistent. But what all of this means is when I ask for someone’s name, I am usually given the dialect version and hardly anyone knows how to write it or how to equate it to Mandarin. If I am lucky, I am given two versions. If not, and if they have passed, then the most reliable way to check is by gravestone (assuming I know where they are buried).
I owe much to my uncle in Malaysia who knows, visits, and cleans the graves of each pair of my grandparents, adopted and biological.
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 and metaphorically 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 read them together. 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
I know nothing of my maternal great-grandfather, who was a lorry driver and died fairly young in a road accident. It was then that my great-grandmother made her oldest son, my mother’s adoptive father, take on her surname so it would be passed down. I don’t know how typical this was in practice, but it strikes me as unusual, for everything flows patrilineal in Chinese culture. A shame, then, for my great-grandmother to see her second son’s family so abundant and her name being left to languish without any heirs. In a forced adoption, my great-grandmother made her second-born son give up his fifth-born child to his elder brother, who was 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. Ironic, too, because he was an ardent lover of the Mandarin Chinese language and traditional Chinese values — the kind that was becoming diluted in Malaysia, far from the mainland, children of Chinese descent were increasigly being sent to English and Malay schools. My mother’s side, which had been in Malaysia a generation longer than my father’s family, were already more distant from their traditions and origins. I do know, however, that my mother’s biological sisters and brothers all have names beginning with a character named “teck” in their local dialect.** It was once in her own name, too, for five years.
The generation before her likely had the generational name 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”. This, I also learned from gravestones.
Of the women (my mother’s mothers, my father’s mother) and where their families come from, we know little. We didn’t ask, and no one told. I wonder what their generational names were, what they might’ve passed down in these shadow poems I inherit by blood — held by and then lost with our women.
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 and, at that point, Mum didn’t have one of her own. 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 collapsed while mowing grass on a particularly hot day. This second one was third-born, 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 confirmed whether this is really our generational name, as written 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. 園 (yuán), on its own, means “garden”. In conjunction with other words, it can become an orchard, vineyard, kindergarten, a place for public recreation (such as a zoo), a place for a designated purpose (such as a graveyard or a campus), or even metaphorically for scope or field. As I’ve written before, I constantly find myself coming back to images of plants and gardening and the act of tending to something living. And placing it after 欽仰 (qīnyǎng) makes that small fragment mean: “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. I wonder, too, what the poem might be aiming at in meaning if such poems were intended to point the clan towards certain virtues or be didactic in nature.
** 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.