What's in a Name?

My name is Michelle Pajkou Xiong. I didn’t know or bother to ask why my parents named me with my name until my freshman year when one of my sister gave birth to a kid and was deciding how to name their baby which got me curious as to how and why they chose my name. My mother told me my first name was chosen by my sister in law while my middle name was named after my sister in law too. And my last name is my father’s family name. At the time my mother really liked my sister in law and because I was a bit difficult to give birth to that my mother couldn’t think of any other names and decided to let my sister in law name me.

I don’t think my family really thought about the meaning of Michelle other than it’s just a name they liked. Although my parents rarely uses my first name whenever they talk to me or wants me to do something instead they use my middle name. My middle names means “golden flower” in Hmong. I don’t tell a lot of people about it because people pronounce it differently and weird and I feel uncomfortable hearing people say it to me other than my parents. My last name "xiong" has a couple of other meanings like elder brother, chest, heroic, and the term that most people refer it to is bear.

I do believe my name suits me because I can’t think of any other name I would have choosen for myself after having my name for seventeen years. There are times I think I should have been named something else like I want to change my middle name to “hlee” which means moon in Hmong but there a lot of Hmong girls with that middle name so I dismissed that idea.

There were other names that my parents thought about naming me and it was a suggestion from my brother. My brother suggested that my mom name me Catherine but since it was a mouthful for my parents since English isn’t their primary language, they didn’t use it. I like my name although there are a couple of my friends that have the name Michelle as their middle name but I still like it. People don’t have that of a hard time pronouncing my first name but when it comes to my middle and last name it does kind of bother me. From the time I was in elementary to the end of my middle school years I always cringe whenever someone tries to pronounce my middle or last name because I was so used to hearing it in Hmong that when other people tries to say it, I wanted to tell them to stop. But after the end of my freshman years, I got used to it but there were some people that pronounced my middle and last name correctly which made me surprised.