"The Name We Carry" by Luke Liu
This memoir is a partner piece to "In the Space Where a Name Was Erased."
The ancestral hall smells of centuries - of sandalwood and yellowing parchment, of polished mahogany and the faint metallic tang of old blood in the wooden grooves where generations have knelt. I smooth my ceremonial robes, the embroidered dragons biting at my trembling wrists. At nineteen, I am both the youngest and the first - the first to know the truth about the ghost in our family portrait, the first to speak his name aloud in this sacred space. The sandalwood incense curls around my person like a question. At the age of nineteen, I am the youngest in our family allowed to perform the rituals of Taigong and the very first to know the truth behind that blurred figure in our ancestral picture.
The photograph hangs slightly askew, as it has since my childhood. Twelve generations of Liu men stare sternly from their frames, but one figure at the edge holds my gaze. His face was scratched away long before I was born, leaving only the impression of a slender frame in a high-collared gown, fingers curled delicately like a poet's or perhaps an opera singer's.
That faceless man lurking at the edge of the frame has plagued me since I was a child. "Who was he?" I had asked, gathering one lie after another like fallen joss-paper ashes. Father had said he was a mischief-maker. Grandfather said he was not even worthy of being remembered. Only Grandmother had shared the real story with me one autumn afternoon, her voice shaking as gently as the last leaf clinging to a persimmon tree: "My brother. He loved opera-and boys-in equal measure."
Image Description: Whisps of white smoke drift down from thin sticks of incense lit in the top left corner of the photo. The smoke is set against a black backdrop.
Credit: Eva Bronzini / Pexels
Her words named something in me that I had been pushing out of my reflection. In the mirror, there resurfaced his gestures in my hands, his defiance in the manner my shoulders resisted the weight of embroidered robes full of tradition. His erasure became a warning to me: This could be
your fate.
But I came, nevertheless. Till the red ritual book seemed to bleed ink into my dreams, I memorized every archaic character. I chanted till my throat bled-not for their approval, but to prove that our lineage could stretch far enough to embrace both of us
Today, with three hundred cousins holding the breath behind me, I land upon the lineage chant: the names of first-born sons spilling like a golden thread-until the blank deliberate space between 1915 and 1927. The space where Liu Zetian ought to be
The incense stick breaks in my hand.
"Liu Zetian," I state, my words cutting across six generations of silence. "Born in the year of 1915. Was in love with peony operas and a certain boy from Hangzhou."
A gasp ripples through the hall. The visage of the grandfather darkens as storm clouds do over the natal mountains. But out of the women's section, a soft sob escapes Grandmother's lips.
With a fresh stick of incense prodigiously lighting for our forgotten ancestor, the smoke rises unlike ever before. It no longer resembles a straight pillar of tradition but is a funny, twisting dance- like silk scarves spinning in the air, like two boys spinning in an almost sunlit courtyard, like pride refusing to be erased.
The cushion beneath my knees ceases to feel like submission; it is embracing a beginning. Today I do more than just honor our ancestors. I become the ancestor that the future queer kids of our line might name.
About the Author
Luke Liu is a high school junior in Shanghai, originally from Wenzhou. He began journaling in fifth grade, and what started as a quiet ritual of remembering grew into a deep engagement with memoir and nonfiction. After moving to Shanghai alone for high school, his writing turned inward, shaped by distance and memory. His essay, In the Space Where a Name Was Erased, asks what it means to belong to a ritual that was not made for you. The questions led him to co-found the Taigong Ji Youth Initiative, a national project linking 28 ancestral halls to update rituals, preserve stories, and invite new ways of belonging. More than a heritage NGO, it is a response to the disorientation many young people feel between globalized modernity and local memory. Luke also serves as Deputy Secretary-General of the Liu Ji Cultural Institute, where he works on burial reform and sustainable land use in southeastern China. In his free time, he plays the Guqin, an ancient Chinese instrument, and tries, with limited success, to convince his dog Gutou that shoelaces are not prey.
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