The other day my mom circulated a photo in the family group chat. A newborn, swaddled so tightly he looked like a cocoon. Ooooh, who’s this new addition? My youngest cousin had just become a first time dad.

It’s a familiar scene. Despite the fact that all babies look pretty much alike, we immediately go searching for traits that bring us familiarity. His nose looks like such and such. We want the baby to already resemble someone. We want him to be legible.

The one thing legible about him wasn’t his name. He didn’t have one yet. This is common practice in Korea. Parents and grandparents take weeks, sometimes months, to arrive at the name their new arrival deserves. In the meantime, some parents use a pregnancy nickname.  But the real name, the one that will follow him for life, waits.

I never thought much of this growing up. It was just how things were done. It’s only now that I’ve started to wonder what it actually means to withhold a name.

In much of the West, it works the other way around. Parents often settle on a name months before the due date. By the time the baby is out, he is already someone, already Peter, already Amy, before he’s had the chance to do a single thing to earn it. And then, strangely, we grow into these names anyway. He looks like a Peter.

Korea does it in the other order. The child arrives, undeniably himself, and then the adults around him go looking for the name equal to what he is meant to become. Because in Korea, a name isn’t just a label. It’s believed to carry actual weight in a person’s fate. Parents will consult professional name consultants or fortune tellers, who take the baby’s exact birth hour and run it through a kind of arithmetic, how the five elements sit relative to the moment of birth, to find a name that will correct for whatever imbalance is already written into the child’s chart.

In one version, you are given an identity and then spend your life catching up to it. In the other, the name is an intervention. It’s an attempt to rewrite a destiny before the story has even begun.

The most striking version of this belief wasn’t about giving a beautiful name at all. It was about giving the ugliest one possible. In premodern Korea, babies were sometimes given deliberately ugly childhood names like “Dog Poo.” The logic wasn’t self-hatred. It was camouflage. There was a widespread belief that a baby given too fine a name would draw the envy of jealous spirits, who might come and take him. So you named him something worthless, something not worth stealing. In an era of brutal infant mortality, an ugly name wasn’t an insult. It was a prayer disguised as one.

I think about this next to the story of my own name. My mother wanted to call me Noah. My grandmother wouldn’t allow it. A name, she said, has to be made by someone qualified to make it. So I was given a Korean name instead.

My name doesn’t sound like the word for it, but its meaning is gratitude, grace, the sense of appreciating what’s been done for you. Someone decided, before I could speak or reason or owe anyone anything, that this was the shape I should grow into. And the strange part is, it took. I’m the kind of person who keeps track of what I owe people, who makes sure a kindness gets repaid. I don’t know if I was always like this or if I became it because it was written into me before I had any say.

Two systems, two kinds of faith. One believes identity is elastic enough to stretch around whatever you’re called. The other believes fate is specific enough that three right syllables can actually move it. I don’t know which is true. But somewhere between the two there’s a version of me that could have been Noah.

Still, I keep coming back to that photo in the family group chat, the newborn with no name yet, just a small body figuring out how to breathe outside a womb. There’s something beautiful in that stretch of time before the naming. The baby gets to just be, unclaimed by any word, while the people who love him watch and wait and try to get it right. He is met before he is spoken for.