My name is Dixin ().

Pronounced disin, the way my mother whispered it when she was tired, the way my grandmother said it when she wanted me to eat more, the way I heard it inside my own head when I still believed I belonged somewhere with certainty.

Di () was the half my father chose, an obscure character.

He liked how it sounded more than what it meant, liked that the name belonged to no one else.

Xin (), meaning dawn light, was chosen by my mother.

At home, Dixin softened into Xinxin and sometimes Da Xinzi by my grandmother, stretching the second syllable as if there were more time inside it. But on the first day of school, the teacher looked at the attendance sheet and turned my name into something I didn’t recognize.

“Dixon,” she said, squinting at the page.

“Dixon,” like a boy.

“Dixon,” like something I couldn’t interrupt.

I nodded. I was five. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be easy.

The teacher wrote “Dixon” on my cubby.

She wrote it on my birthday chart.

She wrote it in thick marker on every worksheet I took home.

My mother stared at the papers and asked why I didn’t correct anyone. I shrugged. I didn’t know how to tell her that every time I tried to say my real name, the sound got trapped somewhere behind my teeth. That silence felt safer than insisting on myself.

The haircut didn’t help. Short. Blunt. Practical. My mother thought it would make mornings easier. Instead, it made the world look at me harder.

“How old is your son?” a woman asked in the supermarket.

“Dixon? His name suits him,” another woman added.

My mother did not correct them.

Everywhere I went, the world said my name like it belonged to someone else. “Dixon” didn’t feel like my skin, but a jacket I’d been wearing for too long. Too tight in some places, baggy in others. Something I could not grow into because it was never mine.

In bed at night I whispered my real name to myself, just to make sure it still fit me. Dixin. Soft on the tongue. A name that felt like it belonged to a girl who might one day find the place she was supposed to be.

When we became citizens, my father chose an English name for me, Angela. After years of “Dixon” I slid into this new name quickly, without hesitation. Angela was good. She was easy. She didn’t have to be explained. Angela was a name I felt I could live inside. In time, I no longer heard Dixin, even at home. No longer spoke it, even to myself.

Years later, a friend asked me how to pronounce my real name.

I said it slowly, and something inside me stirred. A feeling I couldn’t name, something close to grief. I was surprised by how soft Dixin still sounded, how much of me the name still held. For a moment, I wondered who I would have become if everyone had said it right the first time. If I’d had the courage to correct them when they didn’t. If I had believed I deserved to hear the sound of my own name.

Even now, when someone calls me Dixin, something inside me straightens, remembers, returns to the child I once was. The girl with the wrong haircut, the wrong name on her desk, learning far too early that disappearing is the easiest way to belong.

Even now, if someone called out my real name, I would turn my head, would recognize myself in its soft sound.

___

Angela Edward writes nonfiction about memory, migration, and the quiet aftermath of intimacy. Born in Beijing and raised in Auckland, she writes across cities, bodies, and time, returning to what cannot be fully left behind. Her work has been shortlisted and recognised by literary journals internationally, and she is currently completing a long-form memoir, Two Keys.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan