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mighty at dawn


When I was carried into the States I received a certificate of foreign birth with another new name on it. In the span of my year-long life, this was the third time I had been given a new designation. The name written there was changed, English, and now also mine. On this occasion I was named after Chinese-American architect Maya Lin. As an undergrad at Yale, she won the blind national design competition for the Vietnam War Memorial. Her winnings and prowess were heavily contested by older, whiter, maler architects outraged when it was her face revealed behind the winning design; surely they knew the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese though. Today you can run your fingers through the thousands of names etched into Lin’s onyx slice of the National Mall. The legacy is almost as clear as its irony: courageous and unrelenting Chinese-American woman prevailed so can I do the same.

According to Chinese custom, and the internet, it’s apparently poor form to have been named after someone else. Naming convention suggests that rarely are phonetics or eponyms driving naming decisions (not inclusive of generational naming patterns). Instead given names are often bestowed because of their implications on fortune or gender. The given Chinese name I grew up knowing means something along the lines of dawn, which on the one hand conjures images of something beautiful, something even feminine, and on the other hand evokes the experience of getting out of bed, which is wholly gender-neutral.

As Xiaohuan, I sit at the cusp of a nautical and a civil twilight; I am a mighty dawn always six degrees away from sunrise. For the nearly twelve months that I lived as Xiaohuan, I wonder how many dawns I actually saw or if it was all predestined for the single dawn that mattered the most—the one where I was lifted from the spirits that shared my fate for the final time.

There is a less romantic and more realistic world in which this name was not given to me but created in the folds of bureaucracy’s jowls. Guo, the orphanage director’s name, is surely a remnant of the revolution and a reminder to me, and anyone else in the orphanage at that time with whom I share the surname, of where we came from. At the very least, the director had the heart to look at my papers and gift me the prosperity of a new beginning over and over again.

As Maia, most of this gets tucked into a little box neatly vibrating in a corner of my brain that I only access when it’s most convenient or when outside forces demand it. A few years ago, looking through my adoption documents, I found a faded post-it note scribbled in the 90s with my supposed birth date, a name that was a character off of mine, and at the end of the procession, a messy question mark.


It seemed that suddenly the name I had also always understood as my own was slipping away from me without my consent because of something lost in translation twenty years earlier. Further digging confirmed this note was a fluke, yet it was jarring to think, even momentarily, that I did not in fact know how I was meant to be packaged and shipped.

For nearly thirty years from the 80s through the 2000s in China, millions of fetuses and infants were in some way excised from their heritage because of a policy negligently created by a group of economists. 99% of the time they were girls not boys, a plain testament to a society entrenched in true patriarchal hegemony for millenia. I was one of them, along with my younger sister, and others I have since found and love. With tiny hands I accepted the most brutal assignment at birth, not that of gender misunderstood, but that of a birthright lost entirely.

Today, when I am held by those whose names were not given but created by themselves out of love for their own liberation, I wonder on occasion what it would be like to have such a clear marker of the before and the now of an otherwise liminal existence. I am quick to remember though that I already know this—that the transition denoted with my own name happened in September of ’97 when I flew across the Pacific for the first time. To change it again with the intent of aligning to a gender that happens to be getting visibility now, for me, feels like a falsification of what has always been true. I am not changed; simply the language and climate around me continues onward, as has always been the case. And by way of my most widely known name I get to remain connected to a familiar shared history: to my sisters whose names are also a mouthful of vowels as sweet as their Japanese meanings—an unsuspecting set of three; to my great-grandmother, whose house cradled my adolescence.

The singular moniker I would consider taking on is one I lived by for likely only a few days, or maybe all of my twenty-seven years in someone else’s mind. Before the hospital steps where I may or may not have been left and found, before the director who may or may not have had a heart, before the parents I know as my parents, is a name whose existence I am uncertain of. My first given name. There are only a few people in the world who would be able to corroborate this, who would be able to introduce myself to me, but I have yet to reach that dawn.