The title of my poem is Names?., I added the question mark because I want to convey my strong doubts about this concept and therefore trigger readers’  interest to continue reading my poem.

I was struggling to come up with a topic to write about at the beginning because I live a normal happy life. I didn’t feel the burden of immersing myself into a new culture nor the liminality that we often discussed in this class that I was supposed to feel as an international student. Eventually, I chose to accept myself for being happy, and that eagerness to express my real thoughts became the first line of my poem: I choose to be honest to myself / here, / That I do not care about my names/ at all. I directly claim my belief that names cannot represent people’s identities and relate that to the potential liminality that does exist using metaphor, and then recognize that it is the power of insensitivity that helps me to get over it.

My poem starts with an introduction of my two names and what roles they play in my life, this sets the background story of this poem. As the first word in the third stanza, “but” represents the shifts of the theme from storytelling to my introspections. I use a 2-em dashes in the line, “Names are just / —— simply names,” to give readers a break to infer what point I want to make, and I also see that symbol as a sigh when I’m writing which breaks the flow to enhance my speechless tone. Then I use an analogy of tags to explain what names mean to me: They are just tools to identify individuals. Stubbornly quoting the whole definition of the word “tags” into the poem is also an analogy of the lack of humanity of names. Names are almost rude because they only represent how others view you, they don’t necessarily represent yourself. So I write: “I’m happy with all that as long as you know, / you’re calling / me” to elaborate on the importance of recognizing one's true self rather than focusing on the name by having a direct conversation with readers for the first and also the only time throughout the poem.  In the next stanza, I point out that I don’t feel trapped between Chinese and American cultures by saying “Not feeling I’m hanging by a thread in the air.” Metaphorically, that thread is supposed to connect me to both cultures and vacant “air” indicates the potential liminality of my identities. This theme repeats again in the last stanza in a more positive way, where I celebrate the power of insensitivity that “fills those emptiness in between.” It emphasizes that instead of being trapped in the liminal space, being insensible allows me to be “expanded.” It empowers me to explore the beauty of challenges and achieve self-growth as an international student. To conclude, I celebrate the power of insensitivity that helps me to block the liminality of identities by using my ignorance of names as an example.

I hope my readers can understand that they don’t have to make apologies for being too insensitive to resonate with certain topics because they need to accept their true selves. I felt ashamed when I was reading Names by Teresa Mei Chuc, because I found out that I couldn’t relate to her poem as the person who had the most similar life experience with her in my English class. Writing this poem itself was an opportunity to explore and accept my opinions on the liminality of identities. When I finished this poem, I felt relaxed because this was the first time for me to acknowledge the power of insensitivity. Therefore, I hope readers will feel the same relief as I did when they read my poem.