March 17, 2021

My matriarchal hyphenate: Why I changed my name to reclaim and embody my whole identity

When I got married in 2018, I didn’t take my husband’s last name. It was never really a consideration, actually; I always knew I’d keep the name I grew up with, and with which I’d formed a life and career. As a person whose life work and identity center around feminism and female power, taking my husband’s name felt like both an antiquated patriarchal tradition and a stripping of something that was innately mine.

As I went forth into post-wedding life with my name unchanged, I was surprised that even after examining my name through a marital lens, my own given name began to feel like an incomplete representation of who I am, like a garment that didn’t quite fit right anymore.

As a half-French, half-Chinese woman (“hapa,” as many half-Asians are called, which means “mixed” in Hawaiian), I’ve always felt a division between two worlds: I’m only half of one thing, and half of another, but somehow never enough of either. I am a human yin-yang. It was my husband who told me, “you are not half of two things, you are 100% both.” And yet my name only declared half of who I am.

My father was born in France (Pilloton means “little pilot” in French), and my mother (Anna Pilloton, née Lam) is Chinese. She was born outside of Chicago to immigrant parents from Qingdao and Hong Kong, who, like many of their era, preserved what they could of their culture, but did the dance of assimilation in order to provide the “most American dream” for their children. Almost all of my mom’s friends were white, and my sisters and I were raised in a predominantly white community. As my mother has grown older, she has re-discovered much of her Asian history, and now strongly identifies as both a feminist and an Asian woman, possibly in part by osmosis through her 3 outspoken daughters. Last year, she declared to me, “I am now a feminist!” and I thought “my life is complete!” She also now frequently attends the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) affinity meetings at the community college where she works, and read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown with me this year, shining light on parts of herself that had remained in the dark for too long. As my mother’s identity has risen and expanded like a tide, so has my desire to declare myself as her daughter. Our lives have merged through a shared identity that had gone unstated for years: we are strong Asian women.

In the first few months of 2021, the rise in anti-Asian violence has skyrocketed to a point that communities and the media can no longer ignore. This, too, comes after the powerful protests and reckonings led by Black Lives Matter in 2020. Asian elders have been attacked and murdered in senseless, incomprehensible ways. A 75-year old man was robbed and pushed to the ground just a few miles from my house, and died of a head injury in the hospital a few days later. And yesterday, on March 16, 2021, a white man named Robert Aaron Long walked into multiple Asian massage parlors in Atlanta and murdered 8 people, 6 of whom were Asian women. When I turned on the TV in the evening, not one of the major news networks was covering the story (they did the following morning, but with language that refused to declare the racially motivated nature of the crimes, one Georgia sheriff captain saying the perpetrator was just having a “really bad day, and this is what he did”). There were zero New York Times op-eds written about anti-Asian violence on the “above the fold” Opinion page. I was infuriated by the feelings of invisibility. Who is telling our stories? Where is there room for Asian anger? What were the women’s names? Who is honoring them? What do we call this senseless violence? Where do I fit in?

Today, March 17th, I am taking my mother’s maiden name, Lam, as a matriarchal hyphenate (I don’t know if this is an official term… if it isn’t, consider it “coined”). I am doing so for myself, for my mother, for my Chinese matriarchal lineage, and for my Asian American community. Lam, the Cantonese translation of the Mandarin surname Lin, means “forest.” It is the name that my grandmother wrote on envelopes and signed on her Certificate of Naturalization. It is the name on my mother’s birth certificate and college diploma. And even predating my mom’s epic declaration as a feminist, she had never really let the name go, changing her name from Anna Elizabeth Lam to Anna Lam Pilloton when she got married. Lam has always been who we are.

To take my mother’s name is not a rejection of my father or my French family, whose story is equally formative, but a more complete and expansive declaration of my identity in the world. To give something a name is to give it power. To give myself this name expands my power. It honors my whole history as French and Chinese, and as a woman whose life has been formed by a long lineage of strong matriarchs. It is my rejection of Asian invisibility, and a declaration that I (and all of us) can be many things at once, not half-and-half, but whole.

To share my decision, I sent my mom an email: “I feel strongly about doing this is both a commitment to myself and a way of honoring you, my mom, and the women who came before me. I hope this feels okay, and that it will even make you proud. And your name comes second because you will always get the last word.” She responded, “You have made my day, hands down.”