From Your Daughter

Did I have a name?

To whom it may concern,

Hi. Lillian again. In my last letter we established that I'm your daughter (surprise!).

All that I know at the moment is that you gave me up for adoption nineteen-ish years ago, and since then I've been living with my adoptive family on the other side of the world.

I'm told that the nannies at the orphanage I stayed at in China gave me a name. They called me Xiǎo Lí, meaning "Little Black."

It was ironic because when I was little I had blonde hair. Mum thinks it was malnutrition, since the orphanages weren't exactly state-of-the-arts. I read somewhere that many asians give kids names that hold wishes for their future. I guess the nannies at the orphanage wished that my hair go black.

In my case, it did. Today, Lillian "Xiao Li" has a lot of dark hair!

I hope that you won't call me Xiao Li, though. I've heard it enough time to know it's my Chinese name, but it doesn't feel like my name. It's the name of a ghost girl, some Chinese baby who didn't have a family or a past. It holds way too much baggage for me to use it.

So just call me Lillian. Nicknames are reserved for my adoptive family and close friends. It's uber formal but it works for me.

On the topic of names, though, I wanted to ask what kind of name you had in mind for me.

I know not everyone thinks of potential baby names when their kid hasn't even been born yet, but you must've thought I had some potential to be worthy of a name.

Were you one of those families who made mental lists of boy or girl names to run through after the birth? Were you the family who wrote an actual list on a piece of crumpled paper?

Were you, by any chance, the family who decided to wait until after the birth to think of a name, thinking that once you saw your child's face you'd just . . . you'd just know?

Sometimes I wonder about the latter. You gave me up, so did you even feel like it was okay to give me a name? You know what they say about names: once you name something it's yours. If you never gave me a name did you know you were going to give me up?

This is a question that's been on my mind for a long time, ever since I was five and I learned that cool people have middle names with meaning (my parents made Xiao Li my middle name, but no one at school could ever pronounce it properly).

I'd be okay with whatever the situation was because now I'm called Lillian, a name I've grown into.

But if you did give me a name once upon a time you can call me by that if you want to. I can't promise I'll be able to say it properly, though. Remember, English is my first language!

Sincerely,

Lillian