What’s in a Name?

“Why did you change your name? And why those names?”

The words drop over our dinner table full of 떡볶이 (tteokbokki, spicy stir-fried rice cakes) and 김밥 (kimbap, Korean rice rolls), homemade Korean street food. We all still just for a moment…waiting. I take a breath. My name given at birth is no longer the name I carry today and, though we’ve discussed this before, there’s a deeper answer my Monkey seeks.

“Because I wanted to fit.”

“You wanted to fit in…” Monkey finishes.

Yes, I wanted to fit in. In a place where no one looked like me, had similar experiences, or could fully grasp what was lost…I simply wanted to fit in. So I explain that I took a name that felt like I was staking claim to an identity that made me fit. One that wasn’t fully mine. I chose my adoptive father’s mother’s name as my first name and my adoptive mother’s name as my middle, which also happens to run in her side of the family. But in doing so, I also traded in something that was mine alone. My name. A name by birth parents had chosen with intentionality to carry the shared family syllable of my birth mother’s.

Monkey isn’t satisfied by this answer. Her eyes catch mine and ask for more. It was my name, what did it really change? Another breath.

In the early years, I moved so much, sent here and there with little explanation that I crafted my own. The best I could guess? I must have been too much trouble. Caused too much trouble. Now, I had finally, maybe, found a place. Maybe my place. And I wasn’t prepared for that bit of stability to evaporate so I wanted to fit into the mold. Even if by force.

A few years prior to my adoption, I had been living in Brooklyn, then Queens, with my paternal aunt, her husband, and two kids. In school, I recall committing acts of petty theft. A stolen pencil here, an eraser there. In another incident, I punched a kid who had bullied me for quarters near daily. I saw them standing on the front stairs of the school, walked right up and tapped them on the shoulder. As they turned to look, I hit them. I doubt I did any real damage, and I definitely didn’t stick around to find out. Even as I write this, some small part of me wonders if these memories happened in the ways they live in the corners of my mind. With no one to ask or reminisce with, it’s a bit too wispy to hold and truly examine.

A little while after those incidents was another move, another home. And after that, yet another. It was from there that I was placed for adoption. While living with my 아빠’s (appa, my birth father’s) younger sister, husband, and two kids, I got in my fair share of trouble. One incident I recall clearly was the day I received a D on a test of sorts. As it wasn’t my first, I was instructed to get the test signed by my aunt so the teacher knew she was aware. My heart stuttered and my mind ran from one strategy to another to find a way out of this predicament. I finally settled on it. My aunt was sending me to school the next day with a check. So the plan was to trace her signature from the check onto the test. No one would know.

They knew.

It was sometime after that I got in some minor trouble again. A day or two later, I was sitting on the stairs with my aunt when she told me she was placing me for adoption. Tears spilled over the rims of my eyes. I clasped my hands together, pleading. All the while, mocked by the sunlight beaming through the windows.

During one of my conversations with my 엄마 (umma, my birth mother) in recent years, I discovered that the name I had known my entire life as mine, 진희 (Jinhee), was not in fact my name. The name she and my 아빠 (appa) had bestowed upon me was simply 진, Jin. A single syllable. But over the years of my 아빠 (appa) calling me 진이야 (Jineeya), an affectionate way to call a child, my paternal relatives had misunderstood. Thus, I would be called 진희 (Jinhee) for years.

As I tell this to Monkey, she walks over to curl up in my lap. Dragon reaches across the table for my hand. My husband’s eyes dart to mine with a glaze of sadness. I don’t always understand how these experiences land when someone listens, not just to the surface, but to the underlying story.