This might not be a total surprise, but "Donna" is not my legal name.
My family decided to call me Donna when I was 10. It was a sunny afternoon, with the kind of benevolent weather that I figure only really exists in childhood memories. My aunt Helen was visiting -- she traveled to Kunming from the States, where she had been living for quite a few years -- and my extended family was on an outing in a park, sprawled across a blanket and a few hammocks, imagining what life would be like for my parents and me, who were about to set out on a one-way trip to Canada.
My parents already had English names. My mom Qingwen (cerulean cloud patterns) went by Wendy, and my dad Yun (clouds) went by Paul because our surname started with a P. They tried to keep some connection between their two names, with a few (barely) overlapping sounds. They only used these new names in conversations with their English tutor, a backpacker who decided to live for a while in my birth city, a Chinese city closer to Bangkok than Beijing or Shanghai in ways more than one. The topic of conversation that afternoon was what my English name should be.
That afternoon, my family was looking up a short list of names like many others before and after us, with the help of a dictionary. In the appendices of the Chinese-English dictionary, there was a list of commonly used (American) English names, and we were going through the names starting with D. We quickly noticed that many were labelled as male names. Of the women's names, Diana was floated around as the first viable candidate. I turned that down because a family friend has been named Charles by his parents. As the day went on, the plain affirming sound of "Donna" pleased the crowd and became my name.
We did not know that Donna is a noun or title, meaning woman/lady in Italian. We did not know that Donna's popularity peaked in the 1960s, and unlike like mid-century furniture, it hasn't made a comeback. We did not know that the name we chose sounded slightly like cultural appropriation, just like we did not know how the next two decades will change us as a family, making us irrecognisable to our former selves.
Today, I hesitate before introducing myself as Donna, especially when they seem to be Chinese speakers. Because in the twenty years since my family left China, growing cultural self-awareness means younger emigres have growingly moved against adopting a name in English. This is in stark contrast to my parents’ generation: my uncle even shortened his surname from Peng to Pen to make it easier to pronounce. Nowadays, an "English" name could be seen as you pandering to the mainstream culture instead of living out your authentic truth. But what would my name be then?
On my passport, I appear as Dan Peng. But is Dan my name?
When I was first born, my parents decided to call me Huan (cheerfulness). Not long after that, they changed it to Dan (cinnabar, red), because the stroke count was apparently better according to a fortune teller. Once I am older, my mom considered adding an additional stroke to my name to further enhance the overall stroke count and renaming me Yidan (one + Dan). That I outright refused, because, come on, who does that?! Within my family though, everyone still called me Huanhuan, a nickname that has no ties to my papers.
My Chinese full name only has two syllables (Peng Dan). Such a short plain name is partially a marker of age. Children born shortly after me, during China's high-growth boom years, tend to have names that are more evocative of Chinese traditions, with references to old masters' poetry and the Confucian classics. A short name means that it is never further abbreviated by native speakers. Therefore, the only people who ever called me Dan were my high-school teachers and classmates in Montreal, a dreary time weighed down by my inability to express myself fully in French. Them and the telemarketers who tried to talk to Mr. Peng.
When Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor, he said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality. My reality is one where none of my names fully capture my lived experience. Now and then I fantasize about giving myself a new name, something that transcends culture like newly discovered astral objects. Until then, you can call me Donna.
