Henry Louis Gates Jr.: The Mystery of Yo-Yo Ma's Name
[Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, Gates was selected to give the Jefferson Lecture, in recognition of his "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." The lecture resulted in his 2003 book, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.]
Yo-Yo Ma has always wondered about his name.
"There's a Chinese tradition that all the siblings from one generation share one character in their names in common, or one syllable," the celebrated cellist explained in an interview for my new PBS documentary series, Faces of America. "And so for my generation, there was Yo"—which means "friendly" in Chinese.
"My sister's name is Ma Yo Chang. ... Either my parents had a sick sense of humor or they—because they did know that Yo-Yo was the name of a toy—either they had no more ideas, and they just said okay, 'Yo-Yo.' But that ended up being my name."...
...[D]uring the 1980s or 1990s—the exact date is unknown—Ma Yo De decided to renovate his home, as did many peasants as China's economy modernized. When Ma Yo De tore down a wall, he was astonished to discover the four volume clan genealogy that he and his father had tucked away for safe-keeping. The volumes had so much water damage that he assumed they were ruined. He started to throw them away, but says something stopped him: respect for his father's memory, respect for his ancestors, a sense that it was valuable in spite of its condition. So he put the whole mess in a box and ritually placed it in the Ma Family Hall located in the middle of the tiny village of Hou Ma. It remained there until our documentary research crew—led by Professor Wang Chung Guang—recovered it, and brought a copy of the book to the United States....
Yo-Yo had never heard of Ji Cang or any of the ancestors whose lives are chronicled in the genealogy. (Only men are named; women are referred to only as "female.") "All your life, you are always searching for unknowns," Ma said, upon seeing the genealogy for the first time last summer in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he was playing at the Tanglewood Festival. "I feel like I'm in the middle of a Dickens novel: 'Here are the papers…!'"
The genealogy goes back in an unbroken line to Yo-Yo's 13th great grandfather, Ma Lin Guan, who was born in the Ming Dynasty in 1435, 57 years before Columbus discovered the New World. The genealogy describes this Ma patriarch: "Our ancestor disdained the city with its noisy bustle and like the solitude of the countryside. Living an upright life and without holding an official post, he accumulated virtue and cultivated goodness. And thus he lay the foundations for the family for ten thousand generations to come, whether the descendants might labor in the fields, study, fish, or chop wood. To pass on good fortune to the descendants—isn't that what it's all about? Isn't it?"...
Read entire article at The Daily Beast
Yo-Yo Ma has always wondered about his name.
"There's a Chinese tradition that all the siblings from one generation share one character in their names in common, or one syllable," the celebrated cellist explained in an interview for my new PBS documentary series, Faces of America. "And so for my generation, there was Yo"—which means "friendly" in Chinese.
"My sister's name is Ma Yo Chang. ... Either my parents had a sick sense of humor or they—because they did know that Yo-Yo was the name of a toy—either they had no more ideas, and they just said okay, 'Yo-Yo.' But that ended up being my name."...
...[D]uring the 1980s or 1990s—the exact date is unknown—Ma Yo De decided to renovate his home, as did many peasants as China's economy modernized. When Ma Yo De tore down a wall, he was astonished to discover the four volume clan genealogy that he and his father had tucked away for safe-keeping. The volumes had so much water damage that he assumed they were ruined. He started to throw them away, but says something stopped him: respect for his father's memory, respect for his ancestors, a sense that it was valuable in spite of its condition. So he put the whole mess in a box and ritually placed it in the Ma Family Hall located in the middle of the tiny village of Hou Ma. It remained there until our documentary research crew—led by Professor Wang Chung Guang—recovered it, and brought a copy of the book to the United States....
Yo-Yo had never heard of Ji Cang or any of the ancestors whose lives are chronicled in the genealogy. (Only men are named; women are referred to only as "female.") "All your life, you are always searching for unknowns," Ma said, upon seeing the genealogy for the first time last summer in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he was playing at the Tanglewood Festival. "I feel like I'm in the middle of a Dickens novel: 'Here are the papers…!'"
The genealogy goes back in an unbroken line to Yo-Yo's 13th great grandfather, Ma Lin Guan, who was born in the Ming Dynasty in 1435, 57 years before Columbus discovered the New World. The genealogy describes this Ma patriarch: "Our ancestor disdained the city with its noisy bustle and like the solitude of the countryside. Living an upright life and without holding an official post, he accumulated virtue and cultivated goodness. And thus he lay the foundations for the family for ten thousand generations to come, whether the descendants might labor in the fields, study, fish, or chop wood. To pass on good fortune to the descendants—isn't that what it's all about? Isn't it?"...