A person wants to change his name, but there are many reasons: he doesn’t like certain words, doesn’t like the meaning contained in the name...or he wants to find his own things through changing his name, just like the protagonist of this story "Meng Nan".
Story Shop
storytelling
1
High months of every year are the "peak season" for applying for ID cards.
has four junior high schools in the jurisdiction, one high school, and thousands of students of the same class. During the summer vacation, these thousands of students began to come to the police station to apply for their first ID card in their lives.
The workload of the household registration room suddenly increased. Every day, from work to before leaving get off work, the long queue at the door never stopped. The students came in groups of three or five, queuing up while joking and making noise, those who were tidying their hairstyles in the team, taking photos and checking in with the police station as the background, and those who flipped each other's household registration books... Occasionally, they met classmates who were familiar with them, and their decibels suddenly increased. That attitude was like having a party in the yard.
just worked hard all day. When it was five minutes before getting off work, the students in the queue finally dispersed. Just as I was about to stand up and move my sore waist, a mother and daughter walked in.
My mother saw that there was no one in the room and asked tentatively: "Have you got off work?"
I hurriedly said: "No, there is still five minutes to get off work - what business do you do?"
Seeing the age of this girl, she is about fifteen or sixteen years old, and she is still wearing a school uniform, and probably came to apply for an ID card.
Mother turned around and said to the daughter beside her, "I said to come early, come early, you have to drag it out, and it's almost time to get off work!"
Daughter frowned and looked impatient: "I should meet our class when I come early! I don't want to meet them!" Then he said to me, "Application an ID card."
"Okay, come here and take a photo first."
After applying for the ID card, the girl asked me, "If I want to change my name...what materials do I need?"
"You are not an adult, are you?" While saying that, I subconsciously glanced at the girl's household registration book - she is 15 years old this year.
"Well, so I brought my mom."
"This requires both parents to sign."
The girl looked calm: "Okay, then I'll bring my dad too next time."
The girl's mother kept listening next to her, and at this time she couldn't help but say to her daughter: "I told you, your dad won't let you change your name."
"I went back and told him that I must change this time."
Mom couldn't help but speak in a high voice: "Why is your name bad? You say you want to change it all day long!"
The girl frowned again and showed unconcealed impatientness. She did not look up at her mother and closed her household registration book heavily: "I just want a name that belongs to her! You are not me, you don't know how ugly this name is."
Most of the adolescent children want to change their name for themselves, and their parents will not agree. I have seen the situation where the guardian refused to sign after a long time of great momentum, so I asked her tentatively: "Why, do you go back and ask your father for his opinion?"
2
That was the first time I saw Meng Nan - she was still named Meng Nan at that time.
After working in the household registration room for a long time, they have more or less sensitive to people's names. The surname cannot be decided by themselves, and the "name" is more particular: every era has popular names. You can roughly infer the era when the owner of the name was born - the generation of parents liked to use "Kinship of the Army", "Kinship of the Country", "Red Army", etc., our generation is popular with the words "Dongliang" and "Botao". In the next generation, "Zixuan", "Ruoxi" and other names with some of the protagonists of the TV series are popular.
In addition, the names given by Fortune tellers generally like to use words that are not often seen in daily life and have radicals of gold, wood, water, fire and earth; if parents chase stars, they sometimes name their children with their favorite stars or characters; if grandpas are named, they will most likely give all children of the same generation according to the genealogy; the most terrifying thing is that parents have no culture and do not know where to turn out the characters, and the names taken for the children are the same name as those nailed to the pillar of historical shame...
I have been working on this job of dealing with "names" for seven years. I have seen many names and I feel that the name is just a code name, and the function is to distinguish yourself from others, that's it. But this does not prevent many people from taking their names seriously, and the big and small mistakes of parents' naming can only be made up for by changing their names in the future, which makes changing names a very common daily business in the police station's household registration room.
Speaking of Meng Nan's name, in my opinion, these two words are often used for names. "Dream" probably means dream, and "Nan" is naturally Nanmu . Golden Silk Nanmu was considered one of the top woods in ancient my country. There are four or five classmates and colleagues I know around me who have the word "Nan" in four or five names. These two words are combined together, and they are all very beautiful names no matter how you look at them. They have no bad meanings, and they are not as bad as the streets. Why does she think her name is ugly?
Soon after, Meng Nan called me: "My dad agreed to my name change." Then he began to consult what procedures I needed.
Her voice was always calm, not as funny as a girl of this age, nor as impatient as she revealed when facing her mother that day. The calm tone revealed a firmness that made people believe that she made a decision after careful consideration.
After I listed the various inconveniences that changing the name would bring to life, Meng Nan still told me in this calm and firm voice: "I have thought about it, I must change it."
I didn't continue to persuade her, but just told her to write an application at home to bring it.
"What content do you need to apply for?"
"It is mainly about writing the reasons for changing your name, just write clearly the reason."
3
One afternoon three days later, I sorted out the materials in the office alone, and a boy walked in.
He walked straight to me: "I'll go through the procedure for changing the name of . I asked me a few days ago."
"When did you come--ah, it's you!" I suddenly realized--the "boy" in front of with a flat head actually Meng Nan!
I couldn't help but look up and looked at her again. Her facial contour itself was a bit tough. After adjusting her flat head, she looked even more heroic than ordinary girls. If she didn't speak, she really looked like a boy. She walked a little hunched, and this time she deliberately wore a wide short-sleeved shirt, and her feminine characteristics were completely covered up.
obviously she wants to "be" a boy.
Meng Nan's reaction to me was not surprising. She even seemed a little proud of her "successful disguise". She took out a file bag from her schoolbag.
"The procedures are all ready, take a look."
"Where are your parents?"
"All of them are here, I'll ask them to come in."
After checking Meng Nan and her parents' IDs, I took the application she wrote and glanced at it, and was a little surprised: the two pages of handwritten paper looked nearly a thousand words. In the column "Reasons to apply for a name change", Meng Nan wrote a very long sentence.
4
Meng Nan's family is five people. She is the eldest, and she has a younger brother and a younger sister. Her parents are one of the few parents in the village who have not gone out to work, but due to the existence of younger brothers and sisters, Meng Nan did not get much attention from her parents. Before she was 12 years old, she had been living a very ordinary life, going to school, after school, and going home. Like most girls, she had a few good friends at school and would be in touch with each other when she got home.
html When I was 313 years old, Meng Nan went to junior high school in the county town. Then, the nightmare began.
Meng Nan, who went to school in the county, was rejected. She did not write a specific reason - it may be that she was unwilling to recall the nightmare that began, or it may be that she herself did not know the reason. The teenage boy and girl often had malice against someone for no reason.
Perhaps Meng Nan did not make enough resistance. After that, this simple rejection quickly rose to mass bullying and became more and more intense. The people involved in bullying have also changed from one or two girls who lead the lead to a group of people, and even the entire class... Everyone gains a sense of identity from this group of people targeting the common enemies.
Everyone wears the same school uniform, takes the same class, and listens to the same songs. In the same class, some people are high and some people live in the dust.
Meng Nan's textbook will appear on the podium for no reason, and will be deliberately missed from time to time, and accidentally touch someone else's stationery. The other party will exaggerately wipe it with a tissue... Faced with all this, Meng Nan just pretended that nothing happened.
Until one day, they shouted loudly as if they suddenly discovered a new world: "'Dream Man', your name is because you dream about men, right?" Then the girls burst into laughter.
A child of fifteen or sixteen is at the age of ignorance. This vicious joke associated with "sex" can always make people feel the stimulation of rebellion and taboos, and arouse the excitement of boys and girls. Everyone was happy and laughed so hard that they could not help but laugh. Meng Nan's name became a joke for the whole class, and even became an adjective for students to attack each other when they were joking. The maliciousness of adolescence is sharp and extreme, and the uncovered malice expressed in words makes people shudder.
In the long pages of paper, Meng Nan did not write any of the perpetrators' names, and replaced them with "them". "They curse me around", "They said why I didn't die", "They forced me every day", "They wrote the word "Dream Man" on the blackboard", "They said I was hungry every day", "They said my parents gave me this name so that I could dream of men"... The "they" full of paper followed by descriptions of bullying, which was shocking. Meng Nan's parents must have read this application, as well. This should be the reason why they agreed to Meng Nan's name change. For three years, they have no idea about Meng Nan’s experience.There is no trace of ink being peeled off on the paper, but for some reason, I always feel that Meng Nan is crying and thinking about those things, and then opens the wounds in her memory, writing these words by word, she has always tried to avoid touching memories. There was an emotion that finally found a breakthrough. Taking this as an opportunity, I vented it on paper, flowing rushingly, turning this application into a confession and a letter of help.
"A very long nightmare", in this application, she described her three years in junior high school, and her name became a part of this nightmare and a voice she was afraid to hear for three years.
Meng Nan's father came in and signed and left quickly. Her mother accompanied her to continue the procedures. I couldn't help but think, after three years, did Meng Nan's parents not discover all this? After reading this application, did they ask her about the bully’s name? Then what should I do?
I am not a psychologist. I don’t know if I should mention this matter at this time. After thinking about it, I still remained silent.
Meng Nan applied to change the name to two very rare words. She said to me: "I have calculated it with someone, this name can protect me."
protection.
I typified the keyboard with no expression on my face, trying my best to control myself from looking at the child in front of me. In the past three years, she looked forward to who would protect me countless times, but my parents, teachers, and those who were able to protect her never heard her call for help.
Finally, she chose to dress herself up as a boy, change her name, and try to turn to the so-called "life" that exists in the dark. She finally decided to stand up and protect herself and say goodbye to the three-year nightmare.
6
Half a month later, Meng Nan's application for changing his name was approved. The one who came to get the new household registration book was her mother. She said that Meng Nan did not get well in the middle school entrance examination, and the score was only enough to go to a very poor school here, and she decided not to study.
"Anyway, she said she didn't want to study anymore." Meng Nan's mother said, "I just said that I could finish junior high school at least."
I didn't think there was any surprise. I just remember a story I saw online a long time ago: a girl who grew up in a campus violence center was also bullied and used as a target of mockery. She could only study hard under the isolation and helplessness. Finally, she was admitted to a golden institution and took root in a big city. A few years later, I returned to my hometown to work and saw the gangster who took the lead in bullying her, living in a house with a dim head and holding her child in a house with difficulty turning around. When I saw the brightly dressed protagonist, I smiled embarrassedly and begged her to have a chance to do something for her children within the scope of her post.
I knew a long time ago that the story of returning home in glory and the plot of online cool stories is not true.
Meng Nan's mother was leaving, I couldn't help asking Meng Nan's whereabouts.
"I went out to work," her mother said calmly, "I went to Shanghai."
At the end, she added: "It's so far."
Yes, so far.
probably will never see "them" again in this life.
title picture | Pictures from "Sadness Against the River"
accompanying pictures | All pictures in the article are from the Internet
(Written/Lu Lu, this article is the exclusive first release of "Human Story Shop" and enjoys exclusive copyright authorization. No third party may reprint without authorization. Violators will be held accountable in accordance with the law.)
