Some of you have wondered why my name is the way it is, so I’ll explain here. I was born in China, but I was brought to America when I was four years old, so I ended up having a Chinese legal name, although if I was born here, my parents would have probably given me an anglicized name. I have tried going by various anglicized names throughout my life, but I decided that for my writing career, I would display amor fati and just use my legal name and see what happens. I always wonder what people think when they see my byline and then read my essays and see that they’re written from someone who is clearly Western. I consider myself completely American and don’t see my name as making me any less American. In fact, the name I was given already implies a Western ethos.

A typical Chinese name involves the family name and then two more characters (or syllables). Yet my name has four syllables, which is an aberration in Chinese culture, and one brought by a particularly Western ideology: feminism. My father’s family name is Peng (彭), and my mother’s family name is She (佘). Usually, children only take their father’s family name, but my mother demanded that her family name also be included because she saw men and women as equal. So yes, I basically have the Chinese equivalent of a hyphenated last name, and because Chinese names are typically written with the family name first, my name would be written as PengSheLuYang (彭佘陆洋).

So what does LuYang (陆洋) mean? Lu (陆) means land, and Yang (洋) means sea. As my parents are both devoted Christians, this was a biblical reference to Genesis 1:10, of God making land and sea and seeing it as good. Thus, my name means that God made me and blessed me. My mother formulated this name as a play on words, because Yang (洋) also means foreign, and in a colloquial context, Yang (洋) means Western. My ancestors were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries, my parents were Christians in a country with very few Christians, and their Christian life in China was always influenced by theological and material resources provided by Western Christian institutions. My mother pursued graduate studies in Singapore while my father did so in the United States, and my parents saw themselves as more Western than Chinese, especially because Christianity was seen, and sometimes is still seen, as Western, even though it posits a universal metaphysic. LuYang (陆洋) implies that despite being born on Chinese land (大陆), I am culturally Western. (Of course, whether or not the idea of a universal metaphysic is inherently Western is a subject of philosophical debate.) My name represents values that can be seen as Western: feminism, liberalism, and Christianity.

Thus, my name itself is already a representation of the philosophical issues that I frequently discuss. I often write about the connections between Western society, Christianity, and liberalism, as well as topics like cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, neoliberalism, identity politics, being versus becoming, sovereignty, and the nature of equality. I am often able to write from an iconoclastic perspective because I come from such a unique background, as reflected by my name.