What is a Name?

What is a Name?

My immigrant father’s love for the English language made him name me after a form of poetry. Sonnet. A fourteen line poem later reimagined by Shakespeare, this poem form is now rarely seen among contemporary writers, but is still a part of the english curriculum.

When I was younger, “sonnet” didn’t seem significant. I rarely came across it, my peers rarely came across it, the people around me rarely came across it. Sonnet was just a name, like every other name out there. Besides the fact that autocorrect never capitalized it if I forgot, sonnet was just a word. A word attached to me. As a name - and nothing else - Sonnet was a reference to me. I defined Sonnet.

As I started getting older that changed. People started having that flicker of realization of meaning, people started recalling that vocabulary word they likely learned in the classroom many years ago. People started asking about it. I got comments about it. 

As I began learning about sonnets in my own english curriculum, and my classmates became more aware of its original meaning, sonnet wasn’t me anymore. It wasn’t always a proper noun, or a reference to me as a person. It sometimes referred to an inanimate set of lines before me. At the same time, I wasn’t only Sonnet. Sonnet wasn’t the only reference to my identity. I was also a “teenager”. I was also a girl. I was also a Asian. I was also Chinese - I was 徐子昱。

Through my time growing up I changed a lot. I’ve always been Sonnet, but now I’m more than that. Sonnet’s always been me, but now it's more than that too. An insightful quote by Neil Gaiman got me thinking about this idea - “Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”