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軒 is timely ambitious hardworking normal awake calm mild-tempered business-like sturdy a roof a structure for a palace a very nice car fengshui master said that my shy lazy disposition was not ideal for a workplace studying environment it would be prudent to give me something that contradicts my existing temperament balances me out gave two characters to choose from to replace the one my hands had grown used to writing on top lefts of worksheets and bottoms of contracts my mother told me back then that it would really help because i was always so tired and distracted not because i have recently been diagnosed with adhd but because i had a feminine character for my name now i sign off on anything to do with work with a masculine version of the word with the same pronunciation my website is masculine my online store my collaborations paychecks my second cousin has my exact same name and i wonder why my cousin gave it to him did he go to the same fengshui master perhaps this fengshui master has an obsession with masculine iterations of names which is why he gave it to a 16 year old girl to replace the one she had been writing for 16 years when i had my second set of name seal stones made the masculine one was larger on a larger dragon when i put it on the bottom of textile pieces which i make with my feminine hands it sits proudly with a smug smile telling me that i made it knowing that i still do not quite know how to sign things and write its strokes the same way but because it is a name it will become mine given the same amount of time when i am 32 and i have owned the name for as long i will be so adept at signing contracts and naming worksheets with it that i will know it is me
萱 is a wild flower in long grass tall thin stalk orange petals it likes the sun doesn’t need much water prefers colder temperatures great for medicinal purposes means mother and happiness yet grieving feels like it is second nature on my birth certificate when i was 4 years old after i drew a sun and a grass patch with a young girl and her dad and her mum in crayons i wrote her name on the back in the centre of the a4 drawing block a legible black crayon scrawl when i write her name in the temple and in letters to her mother and my aunt tells me my dad made a donation to the monastery so which name does she use because my dad accumulated good karma for me of a tall day-lily that towers an invasive species can barely survive in singapore because it is so humid that all memory of my name sweats off my nose and cheeks i thank my father for the good karma but actually i do not really need it i am convinced that my life ends here in a full circle my identity dedicated to a mother that once was mine but now belongs to a long long long lineage of more mothers whose names i never knew and sat at a loom beating sacks to line roofs for new homes under the weight of their sweaty nose and cheeks named me because it sounded like a sweet name looked pretty because the character is symmetrical ran away from home abandoned her poor lonely father made long swathes of linen cloth that remind her of a home a mother that died now i am signing at the bottom right opening a bank account in london a mother asking me if i am comfortable trying to fall asleep like her mother’s mother’s mother crossed a few borders the same woman who tells me she wants to watch me walk down the aisle but leaves before i even date any boy feeling like derrida’s spectres of marx is more like spectres of mother if i just cross out marx berlin and europe and replace it all with singapore muar and kuala lumpur where my mother’s ghost haunts me many thousand miles away in london working into nonexistence the same wild flower who is spending all mother’s inheritance on an art education on a paper about the origins of something quite so feminine but quite so uncontained the next border i will cross with the name my parents wanted me to have that rolls off the tongue a single syllable contained in its own childish glee a bright orange a conversation that occurs only in circles housed beneath a cold winter sun a trail of smoke that floats up in front of my red council house flat the sweat on my nose evaporates in a crisp air that does not exist where you came where the damp warmth sits on my eyes morning dew turns into a pool where i came where my mother waited for me to run away in a pale blue mitsubishi colt shaped like a dinosaur egg under a 100 year old tree that grew by the seaside until i no longer am a petal sending its last breath into the winter breeze a tropical storm reminds me that like water i will evaporate again dragging out the aaaaa to tell you i’ve come home now
