self-made woman

Unlike most of you, I got to choose my name, my religion, my citizenship, my race category. Was that cool? Or was it a lifetime spent on trying to find just who I was. Most of you born into a family, given your name, and raised in a religion knew who you were, where you belonged, and what was expected of you.  What about me?

 

I was born in Berlin only because my pregnant German mother who had married my Chinese father, did not feel safe in Nanking in 1937 as the Japanese were about to launch their devastating attack. So she took her daughter Joan back home to Berlin and subsequently gave birth to me in December of that year.  The hospital insisted on a name for the birth certificate.  My mother thought it was silly.

 

“I’m here temporarily.  This is my Chinese child, she does not need a German name.”

 I was jaundiced, but my mother insisted it was because I was half Chinese which caused my yellow skin. 

 

Finally, my grandmother was sent to jot down whatever she felt like on the certificate.  It was many years later when we escaped from China and needed my birth certificate, that we discovered the name I was given “ Lila Barbara Monica”.

 

Several months later, my father became acting ambassador to Rome, so my family moved to Italy and lived in the Chinese consulate.  A grand palace that was given to Mussolini as a bribe. He didn’t like the briber and sold the palace to China.   During those glorious three and a half years, I grew up without a name.  Everyone called me “baby” because soon we were returning to China where I would be given my real name.

 

Finally at age four, when we moved to Chong Qing, I was named “Hsiao Yu”  little -jade.  None of my siblings were ever baptized.  My mother was raised in a strict Lutheran household; she had had enough religion shoved down her throat, and swore to save her children from it.  My father was raised with no religion, and happily allowed us to grow up and choose a religion if and when we saw fit.

 

When I was eleven years old, in 1949, the civil war in China caused my mother to flee once more with her children.  The communist regime blamed much of China’s ills on Western influence and all of us with Western blood were not safe in China.

 

On the ship to the U.S., my mother decided to give me an American name since Hsiao Yu was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce.  She had seen the Lawrence Olivier movie of Henry V and decided to name me after his wife, Catherine of France. Only she spelled it with a K.   I now sported another name.

 

 I was fifteen when I decided to become a Christian.  At my baptism I was to choose a middle name, I chose Elizabeth.   

 

Just before my marriage to Ray Haas, I was told that three official documents HAD to match, the birth certificate, the marriage certificate, and the death certificate.   So I went back to the registration office and changed my name to Lila Barbara Monica Katherine Elizabeth Hsiao Yu Hsu Haas.

 

When I decided to become a U.S. citizen in 1959 while my husband was attending Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut; (I believe I could have chosen to become a German citizen at age 18 because I was born there), I was asked if I wanted to change my name.   Before I could answer, the person in charge of testing me with all sorts of tricky questions crossed out all but two of my names, saying, “ You don’t want to have all these names!”

 

What tricky questions did he ask? He asked me to explain what the bills of rights were and what they contained. How many amendments to the Constitution were there? He asked me to name the Supreme Court justices. I think he was angry at me right at the beginning when the first question he asked was for me to name the senator of Connecticut and I said, “Thomas Dodds, DEMOCRAT!”

And he shouted back, “I did NOT ask you what party he belonged to.” 

 

I almost acquired a ninth name. The year after I had been adopted into the Hunkpapa tribe, one of the seven council fires of the Lakota Sioux, my Indian sister, Mary Alice Brown Otter,  planned to give me her Indian Name at the next pow-wow in Bull Head, South Dakota. Names could not be given without the tribe’s permission.  The recipient needed to be deserving of receiving the name. In order not to go through that process, Mary Alice planned to give me her own Indian Name  “Wea luta wi.” Little red woman.   I asked what would happen to her if she gave her name away to me.  She told me that from that day on, when referring to her in a song or announcement they would call her “ Oh educator.” 

 

Though I was immensely honored to be given her name, I was concerned about taking away something so special from her.  As it turned out, I had to return to Annapolis early that summer for a computer workshop for teachers and had to miss the ceremony.  I never got the name that was so generously offered to me.  I was really sad at the time and did my best to sabotage the computer workshop.  But in the end, I am glad Mary Alice kept her name as she lived only a few years after that.

 

As for filling out forms that ask for race… sometimes I put Asian, and most times I check  Other. If there is a blank, then I write Eurasian.    Sometimes I put ½ into two boxes.

 

On looking back, having all the choices, was it fun or was the longing to fit in, to look like everyone else more palpable?  Both.  It was a lark much of the time and there was sadness too.