What is the importance of names in the novel, Yolk?

Names are symbolic of nearness or distance. In Jayne’s initial sightings of Ingrid, a woman who suffers from an eating disorder, she does not know her name but refers to her in her mind as “Cruella” (55). When she later meets Ingrid at an eating disorder support group and learns her real name, her previous perception of her, which was based on her appearance, begins to fade and she finds the other woman to be a helpful connection. It is also only towards the end of the novel that Jayne learns that her own Korean name, Ji-young, was not inspired by the name of her dead sibling, who was named Ji-soo. In both of these cases, a real name symbolizes a truth that only becomes visible to Jayne as she is willing to approach a person, while the imagined, false name is representative of a fiction that corresponds with her distance from other human beings.