Names That Travel

When Ayaan, a Swedish-Somali journalist, begins tracing an old family legend about a blue bowl, two keys, and an ancestor said to have carried a giraffe to the court of a Chinese emperor, she expects a story.Instead, she finds names, debts, vanished rooms and carefully guarded silences stretching from Mogadishu to London — and back toward a fifteenth-century Indian Ocean voyage.Moving between Sa'i...