Names

Almost everyone I meet calls me by my English name. The rest addresses me by a name known by less than a handful of people, a name from my motherland, the name of a poplar.

Mom tells me stories of her childhood in Northern China where the trees were ubiquitous. She described them as being composed of stability and stoutness. A light silvery white is painted over its trunk, as it shoots into the heavens with a skyscraper’s undeviating mentality. Sturdy branches jut from the sides indiscriminately, appendages of an almost eerie quality. Dangling at the ends are small rounded leaves, green on one side but an almost-metallic white on the other. As breezes go by and they dance in the sunlight, the scintillating effect is near surreal, hundreds of miniscule mirrors turning rays of sun into a light show. When the clock of seasons strikes spring, flurries of seedpods float off the tree, each with a parachute of white fibers, like the down of a goose. When the humid summers arrive, pedestrians strive to reach breaks of heat under the massive dark shadows the tree casts onto the sidewalk.

My surname is nothing like my first though. It’s just a name. It has no meaning. How could there be significance when they're millions of other people that carry the title? But at least the name given by my mom has blessed me with an identity.

(more freshman year writing..)