It started when my father named me after a poem.

“桃李不言 /下自成蹊.”

“Peach trees and plum trees are silent, but lines form beneath them.”

In the first line, our surname 李, “plum” precedes “不言”, “silent” — or, when translated character by character from Chinese into English,“no speech”. As an homage to some warrior of the Spring-Autumn period, B wanted quiet integrity for his firstborn. So I was Li Bu Yen.

No Speech Li.

But for the times it tastes of poison, there’s nothing more pernicious than silence. Silence is resignation, passivity; the most insulting kind of complicity because it’s rooted in inaction — in not caring, or worse, in the choice to look away. My aunts saw this too: when they heard over the phone what their baby brother had called their niece, they erupted in protest, white static crackling across the oceans between Pennsylvania and Beijing, “You can’t name a girl that! Speechless Li. Mute Li. Silent Li. Naming her that’s like child abuse. Think ahead seven years to the bullies at school! Give her a real name.” Instead, they called me 冬瑶 because I was born past the tail of November — “Dong Yao”, Stone of the Winter” Li ,冬冬 for short. But it was too late: 李不言 was on my birth certificate. I was already Buyan Li, “Booyen” Li; or eventually “Boo - yawn Leee”, for every time it tripped off another substitute teacher’s tongue.

What’s truly in a name? Something certainly more powerful than a rose that smells as sweet; for at the time I first met A I had already become CC. And by then, she’d already swallowed a silence like methadone — like swallowing whole pieces of the orange sky — complicit in her own demise.

(9/9/2020, San Francisco)