Still Life With Robin: Name That Panda!

Unnamed baby panda (photo by National Zoo)

by Peggy Robin

The National Zoo has announced a list of 5 choices for the name of our new baby panda. You can vote once a day at http://bit.ly/1iKBQjA for your favorite of the list until November 22.

The options --all supplied by the Chinese government-- are:

o  Bao Bao (宝宝): Precious, treasure.
o  Ling Hua (玲花): Darling, delicate flower.
o  Long Yun (龙韵): Long is the Chinese symbol of the dragon; Yun means charming. Combined this represents a sign of luck for panda cooperation between China and the United States.
o  Mulan (木兰): Legendary young woman, a smart and brave Chinese warrior from the fifth century; also the name for the magnolia flower in China and the United States.
o  Zhen Bao (珍宝): Treasure, valuable.

Washington Post Metro columnist John Kelly in a short but passionate piece on Wednesday (http://wapo.st/16GTUcf) went all out for Bao Bao, actually saying, “I beg you to vote for Bao Bao.”  Mainly, he was on a tear against Mulan, on the grounds that the story of the heroic girl warrior girl has been Disneyfied, and that “The Mouse gets enough publicity.”

I would urge just the opposite: Mulan is the only stand-out choice among a bland and boring lot. Mulan, whether from the Disney movie that Americans know or from its source as a 6th Century Chinese ballad (probably based on a much earlier folk legend -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Mulan) is a figure of bold, stirring, heroic action. Mulan is the only name among the five that is more than just a way of saying that a panda is “precious,” or “charming” or “darling.”

I especially hope we don’t end up with Bao Bao. There used to be a famous panda by that name at the Berlin Zoo, but he died in August, 2012 at the ripe old (for a panda) age of 34. Here’s his obituary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-19346997. Our new panda needs her own name and her own identity!

My real wish is that we could reject all five of the names pre-selected for us by the Chinese government, and be allowed to come up with our own American (or perhaps Chinese-American) name for this American-born baby of a species indigenous to China . We may have to ship her back to the land of her ancestors when she’s just a few years old, but while we have her, why shouldn’t we be allowed to come up with a name that reflects our own feelings about her, and sounds good to us, too?

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Still Life With Robin comes out on the Cleveland Park Listserv and All Life Is Local on Saturdays.