My mom took my dad’s last name when they got married. In Japan, married couples are required to have the same surname—a law upheld as recently as 2019. For my mom, the self-preserving act was keeping her maiden name, Nakaji, as a middle name and passing it on to me and my brothers. Because she did this, I grew up thinking of my whole heritage every time I wrote my full name.

Part of my relationship with my name is specifically Japanese. The Japanese language has three alphabets, and native Japanese names are almost always written in kanji, the alphabet brought over from China. Foreign names are written in katakana, a phonetic alphabet recognizable for its simple, angular shapes. In Japan, even though Mia and Nakaji are Japanese and have kanji, my other two names, Gabrielle and Monnier, mark my name as foreign — not just because they are French, but also because they bring my name total up to four, which means I don’t fit the standardized Japanese last name–first name format (Murakami Haruki rather than Haruki Murakami).

Every time I filled out a form in Japan, I had to decide in which order to write my names, and each time I used kanji, I knew it was a small act of rebellion that would lead to a prolonged conversation about my identity. The mainstream Japanese idea of homogeneity is so strong that even Japanese Americans with entirely Japanese names — including Anna Suzuki, who grew up in Japan — have their names written in katakana, in Western first name–last name format.

In the United States, meanwhile, I get more questions about my last name than I do about my ethnically flexible first name. Mia Monnier is read as French, therefore White. After a decade of going by Mia Nakaji Monnier, it feels strange to see my abbreviated first-last name on a piece of mail, like it’s lacking, even though it was my name for 20 years. Similarly, when a Japanese relative writes my name in katakana, I feel sad, like they’ve unwittingly closed a door between us.

When I mentioned this story to my friend Natsuki Atagi, a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University, Fullerton, who focuses on bilingualism and language development, she reminded me that names are a part of language, and they specifically act as labels. That may be why people always want to know what names mean, she told me, because they’re looking for information on how to see us. I’ve thought about the ways in which my brothers and I have lived out our Japanese names, almost as if they were prophecies: The “a” in Mia is used to spell Asia, the “mi,” which means “beautiful,” is also the first character in the Chinese spelling of America. My brother, whose name means “great hermit,” has lived out of his car in three cities this summer. My brother the pegasus flies out of reach. The names and the experiences reinforce each other, becoming personal myth.

Choosing whether or not to change our names allows us to decide what story we tell the world, but also, maybe more important, what story we tell ourselves. I began using Nakaji to declare my Japanese identity — an act of both defensiveness and pride. If I took my fiancé’s last name, I could say the same thing more simply with just two names, first and last. In Japan, I could use kanji and go last-first, passing on paper, if nowhere else. But in the time that I’ve gone by this name, it’s become more than a cultural credential. It feels like claiming my mom daily, publicly. My dad, too. It turns out that as much as I want to be seen and accepted as Japanese, I don’t want to pass as anything other than I am. I need my fiancé for love and partnership, not access to a community that is already mine.

In our interview, Threadgould told me about a poem by the border poet Heriberto Yépez called “Nada,” from his book Transnational Battlefield, which explores the idea of declaration. When a person crosses the Mexican border into the United States, Threadgould explains, the first question they are asked is, “‘What are you bringing?’ And you’re expected to say, ‘Nothing,’” she says. “Sometimes I feel like that is what having an Anglo surname is asking me to do. It’s asking me to say, ‘Nothing.’”

In diaspora, what remains of our families’ cultures is limited, precious. What can we claim instead of nothing?

Last summer, I visited my brothers in the Midwestern town where they were sharing an apartment at the time. They’re four and seven years younger than I am, both metalheads, different from me in most ways apart from our thick, wavy hair, our shared family experiences — and our names. On the cluttered dining table sat a pile of the older one’s pay stubs, bearing his full, four-part name: Western first name, Japanese middle name, Nakaji Monnier. It was just a name, unceremoniously printed, but looking at it, I felt my experience mirrored, my childhood summed up, the comfort of my siblings and our parents’ gifts to us.

In this prairie town, far from home, I saw where I belonged.