Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

I suppose he was expecting me to do the assignment myself (and why would I have? I wanted to ask him, for I did not think I had a reputation among the children as someone who would take responsibility for their failings), but I commanded him to the kitchen and ordered him to start mixing the ingredients, none of which we had, of course, which necessitated a hurried trip to the store before it closed for the day.

We worked in silence, mostly. He was restless, quite literally jumpy, hopping from foot to foot in a manner that I found very distracting but that I would later realize was a sort of warmup, a prelude to a fight to which I had not known I was invited. “Now you have to roll out the dough,” I told him, and when he didn’t respond — he was staring, mouth slightly open, at apparently nothing more interesting than a fat squirrel crouched on an apple tree branch outside — I snapped at him. “Victor! The dough! Victor!” And he turned back to me, scraped the dough out of its bowl, and slammed it onto the counter with a wet thwack .

“You’re getting it everywhere, Victor,” I said to him, and then, when he once again didn’t respond, “Victor! I am talking to you!”

Again silence. And then, “Why was I named Victor?”

“I told you,” I said. “I named you for the pilot who took us away from U’ivu when I was adopting you.”

“But why him?”

They always wanted to know, my children, why they had been given this name or that. They were fond of self-mythologizing, and I think they all hoped that there might be some heroic story behind their naming, that they alone might be imbued with a special significance, that I might have secreted some message to them in my choice that they would one day understand and appreciate. The truth, however, was that I had usually simply named them after people I had encountered on my journeys to and from retrieving them: they were named after check-in counter clerks at airports and managers at hotels, customs agents and bellhops, pilots and stewardesses, seatmates and waitresses, unknown State Department functionaries who had cleared their entries and familiar immigration officials who had waved at me as I advanced toward them, holding the hand of a new charge. What could I do? I had long ago exhausted the names of friends and colleagues, and by the late 1970s the children were arriving so quickly that contriving imaginative names for them hardly seemed an essential concern.

“Why not?” I asked him. “It’s a good name.”

“Victor is a stupid name,” said Victor.

“Don’t act like a child,” I told him. “Victor is a fine name. And anyway, it’s the name you have, so you must learn to live with it.”

“I am a child,” said Victor. “And I hate the name Victor.”

“You weren’t listening to me,” I replied. “I told you not to act like a child. Being a child in and of itself doesn’t obligate you to behave like one. And I never said you had to like the name Victor — go ahead and hate it all you wish. I only said you had to learn to live with it.”

He had no response to this but a sulky silence, and I found myself weary of him.

And then I asked the question no parent should. “What would you like to be called instead?”

Of course he had an answer prepared.

“Vi,” he said triumphantly.

Sometimes I really don’t understand what came over me. Why had I provided him such an opportunity? But occasionally, after years upon years of these conversations, one forgets oneself and makes regrettable errors.

“Vie?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. It reminded me of the time Sonia 80came home with her beautiful woolly hair chopped off at the ears and dyed with white streaks. As a parent, I was always ready to let my children “express themselves,” or whatever the excuse for bad behavior is nowadays, but I do have limits. What child psychiatrists and liberal-minded teachers refuse to acknowledge is that most children have no taste and indeed tend toward the tacky. Just as it is a parent’s responsibility to instruct his children in the matter of manners, ethics, and morality, so it is to give them some sort of aesthetic and cultural education, so they don’t grow into vulgar adults, the sort who contrive new and needlessly complicated ways to spell their names and consider the plotlines of recently viewed television comedies appropriate dinnertime conversation. “As in to vie for a new position? Or to vie among your siblings for a new way to irritate me?”

But he wasn’t provoked even by that. “V–I,” he explained, as if to a slow child. I had heard him use the same tone with Giselle, one of the toddlers.

“Vi,” I repeated. It still didn’t make any sense, and I told him so. “Really, Victor,” I said, “if you feel that strongly about changing your name, I suppose we can discuss it, but couldn’t you pick something less ridiculous? Why not go by your middle name?” Victor’s middle name is Owen. 81

“No,” said Victor briskly. “That’s a stupid name too. I won’t have some white man’s name.”

And at this I was surprised, and turned around just in time to see him smile. He was triumphant that he had gotten me to react, and I cursed myself silently. “What are you talking about?”

“Have you ever noticed,” asked Victor, “that all of us have white men’s names? All of us. It’s so false . You’re trying to whitewash us, make us forget who we are and where we come from.”

And once again I found myself turning and looking at him. I gave you a name because you were nameless when I found you , I thought. A dog. Less than a dog . It took some effort not to say this, and had I been more perturbed, I might not have been able to stop myself.

Where did they learn these things? Victor was very wrong if he thought he was the first child of mine to experience this false revelation and then accuse me, haughty with outrage. “Came from,” I corrected him. “And really, Victor, this is too boring a conversation. You sound like some reactionary, and reactionaries are never noted for their originality.” He had by this time sewn his mouth into a long, thin seam and was looking at me with something like hate in his eyes. “And if we’re to speak of contrivances,” I told him, “then the name Vi is one of the most preposterous I’ve heard. Vi is no more a U’ivuan name than Victor is!”

(Still, the minute I heard that absurd name, I knew how he had conjured it: the vuh sound, its short, clipped monosyllabism, gave it a faint whiff of the South Pacific, albeit in only the most reductive and affected way. Over the years my children have created all sorts of names they believe allude to their native country and culture: Va, Vo, Vi, Ve, Vu; though Micronesian in intent, they usually wind up sounding rather Vietnamese.)

Victor opened his mouth and then closed it; he was, after all, still a child, and he knew I was correct. And then, in a gesture that reminded me so much of the boy’s I felt chilled, he raised his chin unnaturally high and lowered his lashes, so it appeared that he was looking down at me, though I was much taller than he. “I don’t care,” he said (a child’s last defense). “Vi at least sounds more U’ivuan than Victor.” And with that, he turned and left the room.

“Victor!” I called after him, more irritated than angry. He had left half the dishes in the sink undone, and there were still mountains of dough to shape and mold. “Victor! Come back here!” But he didn’t, and I had to finish rolling the dough myself, straining my shoulders against it as if I were kneading flesh.