My mother was a demure and dreamy eyed bookworm as a girl–the kind that took to reading fantasy or fairy tale stories alone in her bedroom all day while her sister and brother were outside raising hell with other kids. There was an old romantic and nationalist Chinese poem she was particularly fond of, about a fair maiden who'd for years faithfully awaited her husband's return from battle. Each day, this woman sat by her window and gazed anxiously over a rich billowing sea of emerald-like grass that stretched beyond her vision into the horizon. When he finally appeared on the horizon, it was like a long lost ship at sea had found its way home. That oceanic field of grass is what I am named after; a body through which one finds her way home.
In the 1980s, political correctness and postcolonial theory were not as deeply embedded in mainstream culture as they might be in 2010. In kindergarten, flustered teachers and administrators who frequently mispronounced my name decided to call me Biddy; the two names are somewhat phonetically similar. In first grade, Mrs. Hart contacted my mother about kids purposely mispronouncing my name. I was called "Bitchy," she said. She urged my mother to respell and anglicize my name so as to avoid confusion and, more significantly, "help me assimilate into the American culture." It had to be explained that "in America," my name "sounds like a bad word."
So I am called Biddy. It is a common Irish name, short for Bridget, meaning "exalted one" in gaelic. The name is incidentally fitting, for the most part. But as in my case, poetry is so often lost in translation.
