What's in a name?

I just learned from a student's journal entry that Mo Yan (the Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature) was born to a family of poor farmers and that his name means "don't speak".  My student wrote, 

"The name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s."  

 His pen outlasted Mao's sword.  Mo Yan was born in 1955 in a very small village in Shandong Province, the same province as the city in which we are living.