On Names
Names carry so much of our own personal histories within them. This was often institutional - surnames often convey class (like caste in India), they carry ethnic and religious roots, and ultimately every culture has their own version of the carpenter named Carpenter and the smith named Smith. And on an individual scale and re my previous post, I’ve always thought about how I could never be a fashion designer because my name was too short and plain. Maison Joy Shi would simply never work! So I wonder - how much do our names affect the person that we become?
Recently I’ve been seeing posts on my feed noting clever instances of “the name makes the man”. Sundar Pichai’s purpose is to “pitch AI”. Sam Altman advocates for an “alt-ernative to man-kind”. I love these.
Anyways, I’ve been wanting to share a little personal instance of nominative determinism, shaped by personal heritage.
My last name is Shi, 石 in Chinese. It means “rock” or “stone”. And it’s important to note that 石 is not a classical Han Chinese Surname, but rather one of nine Sogdian surnames. Sogdia was an ancient Iranian civilization spanning modern Iran and Central Asia, and during the Silk Road period, these surnames were given to Sogdian traders that settled in Imperial China.
石 was the name specifically given to the traders from ancient Chach, which through a series of linguistic interactions from Proto-Iranian to Turkic, means “rock” or “stone”. Chach is now modern day Tashkent (literally “rock city” in Turkic), and if you go to the Wikipedia page for Tashkent you can literally see my last name Shi 石 mentioned several times in the etymology section.
Over time the original 石s mixed with the local Han Chinese and soon thousands of people in China had this surname. So many that there is a city of comparable population to New York City named after us - the famous Shijiazhuang 石家庄, which literally means Shi (Rock) family township.
My dad - from whom I have this last name 石 - grew up in a 石 family township himself. It was actually a group of 石 family villages in northeast Hubei province, and he specifically grew up in one called 石家宕. Here is a map of the historic locations of the villages from our family’s genealogy book (as a sidenote I am actually the only woman in this whole book since my father moved to the US, and times have changed)
You can see there is a 石家沟 (Shijiagou) and 石家湾 (Shijiawan) as well. These are just named after geographical features like stream or cave or valley, but it reads as “Shi (Rock) Family stream/cave/valley”.
At this point, the 石s were named after “Rock City”, and settled in “Rock Family Townships”. My favorite part of this story though, is that when my father emigrated to America and had me and my brother in a suburban city in Maryland right outside of Washington DC, he chose to live in Rockville. And I grew up in Rockville, always thinking about how much of a coincidence it was that my last name literally meant “rock” in Chinese, and only recently learning that my ancestors have always lived in their “Rockvilles”, and that nominative determinism is a real, beautiful thing.
[ As a footnote, I’ve been interested in names because of historian Moshik Temkin who introduced me to the Marxian view of history and noblesse oblige, which I first made the connection during our discussion of the Roosevelts, hence this whole rabbit hole of names, class, heritage, culture, etc]