Request for Comments
by The Scarily Erudite Beloved
SEB, here, with another guest entry.
So we’re going to China. In a little more than three weeks. Rex is going to schlep around with me for a couple of weeks while I survey county-level museums in southern Shanxi province, and engage in some schmoozing (“guanxi”) as well, to renew my relationships with various Chinese archaeologists. Rex will get to see me In Action, finally. It will probably be dull for him.
Nevertheless, he needs a Chinese name. Most if not all Westerners who study Chinese take a Chinese name, usually chosen by one’s Chinese teacher. This lets you practice and get used to the ways names and titles work in Chinese, but if you later spend any significant time in China, you also find that it is much easier to go by your Chinese name, which is often much easier for your Chinese colleagues to remember than the polysyllabic tongue-twisters we use among ourselves. So I need to give Rex a name for this and future trips.
Choosing Chinese names is a tricky business, especially for non-native speakers, and many Westerners end up with dumb-sounding names because their Chinese teachers didn’t have the time or the classical education to choose something poetically appropriate, or didn’t foresee unfortunate homonyms, etc. (I knew someone in college whose Chinese name sounded exactly like the word for “premature ejaculation.”) But if you’re going to travel to China a lot, this is the name by which you’ll be known, so you want to choose appropriately.
I got lucky. My first Chinese teacher (almost 20 years ago!) was not a native speaker of Chinese, but she chose a name that turned out to have some lovely poetic resonances, and that is classical enough that it seems appropriate to Chinese ears as the name for a person who is highly educated. It also lends itself to nicknames. My name is Long Meiruo é¾æ¢…è‹¥; Long, the surname, means “dragon,” while Meiruo means “like a plum blossom,” meaning the winter-flowering prunus, that blooms while the snow is still on the ground. I’m from northern Maine originally, and my teacher reasoned that anyone who can grow up in Maine must be able to bloom in the winter. It sounds classical because the dragon and the plum blossom are very ancient poetic symbols, and because my teacher inverted the usual order of characters in my personal name (modern syntax would favor “Ruomei” over “Meiruo.”)
The name suggests a variety of different nicknames: my host family from a 1988 homestay, who were old revolutionaries, a couple of ideologically unimpeachable former army doctors, thought it should be understood as meaning “like Long Mei” (é¾æ¢…), an obscure revolutionary heroine. Classmates and colleagues near my own age called and continue to call me “Young Long” (å°é¾), but as this also means “Young Dragon,” it sounds a bit masculine to some, and older people have called me “Young Mei” (å°æ¢…å) in a rather old-fashioned style. Finally, after somebody cracked a joke to this effect at a conference in 1998, the entire staff of the Wenwu chubanshe (Chinese archaeological publishing house) and everybody I know at the Central Academy of Fine Arts remembers me as Xiaolongnü (å°é¾å¥³), “The Dragon Girl,” who is the particularly butt-kicking heroine of a Jin Yong martial arts novel. The name has served me well.
I’m wondering if I can do nearly as well for Rex, and here’s where you come in with the comments, Fearless Readers. I think I’ve got a name for him: it’s Gong Yanda (é¾”é›é”). First, I wanted a G-surname, to go with Golub; there are a lot of choices, but I went with Gong because it’s composed of the character long for “dragon,” my surname, with the character gong, meaning “together,” below it. My overeducated Chinese colleagues will get this immediately.
Yan is a kind of wild goose, long a poetic trope for unfettered soaring of the mind and heart. In legend, they were said to carry messages between those long separated. For example, Liu Shang’s (劉商) poem cycle Eighteen Songs for a Nomad Flute (胡笳åå…«æ‹), written about 773 CE, describes the homesickness of the Han dynasty Lady Wenji, abducted about 195 CE by the Xiongnu to be the wife of a nomad prince. It contains these lines, in the tenth song: é‚令邊é›è½‰æ€•äºº 絕域何由é”方寸 “The wild geese of the frontier, it is said, fear men; here, at the ends of the earth, how can I make my heart heard?” Lady Wenji worries that the wild geese of the steppes will not carry her longing back to her home and family, as a Chinese goose would. These lines also contain the second character of the name, da, which can mean to reach, to arrive, to expand, etc. Yanda might then translate as “to go far, as a wild goose.” It is, I think, a good name for someone who is an exuberant writer and thinker, with an energetic imagination and a taste for adventure. What do you say?
Anybody who calls him “Exuberant Goose Golub,” however, is just asking for trouble.
[...] me archival work and we are trying to come up with a Chinese name for me. There’s an RFC up on my own blog, so feel free to comment. I thought I’d mention it here since my personal [...]
I’ve always liked my Chinese name:å‚…å¯æ©, which doesn’t sound too much like a foreigner name (i.e. one made up phonetically to sound like some non Chinese name), and where the sound and the meaning of the last two characters (ke-en) matches my name. However, that was until last week when someone made fun of me for having such an un-Taiwanese name. They went off on how foreingers always have really pretentious names that don’t sound like real people at all. So, I guess my point is that you can’t really win…
[...] Exuberant Goose Golub All those Chinese speakers out there reading this blog, please help Rex pick a Chinese name. {Chinese, names} This entry was posted [...]
It is also good because geese are quite at home in the water.
I love how Gong plays on your surname, and Yanda seems fitting.
It’s interesting to me that Chinese retains so much meaning in people’s names — unlike most Western cultures, where all we usually know about our name’s meaning comes from the B.S. in baby name books.
Kerim, that’s interesting; I’m not sure how to read that reaction to your Chinese name (beyond the fact that, as you know, there’s always someone who’s going to tell you you’re not Chinese enough). Who gave it to you, anyhow? It is interesting to me because the character en (æ©) is mapped on to rather different theological concepts in Buddhism and Christianity (to name just two). The meaning of your name would be quite different in a Buddhist vs. a Christian context. What does “Kerim” mean, btw? Is it related? Neither ke nor en is commonly used in naming, though, so that may be what people are getting at when they say your name is unusual; and my sense is that some might also find the doubled e sound odd. Also, both ke and en are commonly used in the transliteration of foreign names, so to some, your name might look like it’s a transliteration.
That said, my entire China experience is on the mainland; in 20 years of Chinese study and travel, I’ve never been to Taiwan. And I’m quite sure that patterns of naming are different in the two areas, to say nothing of changes in naming patterns that occur over time. Many people of our generation in the mainland, born during the Cultural Revolution, are stuck with personal names like Donghong æ±ç´… “The East is Red,” Jianguo 建國 “Establish the Nation,” Zhenjun æŒ¯è» “Raise the Army,” or Zemin 澤民 “Benefit the People,” which sound unbearably dated today. (These are all personal names of people I know, and in the case of Jianguo, several people I know.) And there was a period of time on the mainland when choosing too literary a name for your child could get you accused of bourgeois or intellectual sympathies, which of course was not the case in Taiwan. There’s an urban legend in mainland China about a man who had three children during the Cultural Revolution and named them Aiguo 愛國 “Love the Nation,” Aimin 愛民 “Love the People, and Aidang 愛黨 “Love the [Communist] Party.” Unfortunately he named them in that order and was thrown into prison for being a Nationalist Party 國民黨 sympathizer!
[Note for non-Chinese readers: "Nation" + "People" + "Party" gives you the characters for "Nationalist Party."]
It occurs to me that ‘yanda’ is Ipili for ‘arrow’, which also has implications of swiftness, movement, flight. Although it does tend to lead one away from the fact that, while akward on land, I am graceful and agile in water.
Also, it appears that I am _already_ the #1 Google hit for ‘exuberant goose’. RAWK!!!!!!
And the #2 hit is “Each year, a few employees sustain minor injuries in altercations with exuberant goose parents,” which is a splended sentence to be associated with.
Anyway, sounds like a well-chosen name, and of course I love the detailed discussion.
Damn. There’s a Chinese name generator out there. I can’t say I’m impressed with the results it’s giving me, but it is sort of amazing that the process can be automated at all. Thanks to J.S. Nelson for leaving the link over at Savage Minds.
Myself, I know almost nothing about the Chinese language, much less the subtleties of name-giving. But I find this an interesting discussion, so I showed the names to a Chinese colleague of mine, Xiao, at work. The first thing he said, of course, was that é¾æ¢…è‹¥ was a beautiful and poetic name. He was similarly impressed with é¾”é›é”, and immediately mentioned the connection with the surnames. He agreed that é¾”é›é” was a good name for well-educated goose. I also learned that my given name has a rather standard transliteration, 汤姆, which Xiao happened to know in part because of the popularity when he was growing up in China of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
While I can’t decipher the exotic eastern characters, I do think Gong Yanda sounds pretty f**king slick and dynamic in English, so I’d go for it.
S
Gong Yanda does sound dope.
I thought “Exuberant Goose Golub” was Alex’s minor league baseball nickname.
J.
No, that was ‘The Bad News Goose’ — and our darkhorse victory that season thanks to our inspiring coach is still one of the most heartwarming memories of my childhood. Almost as heartwarming as my narrow escape with my chimpanzee companion in my 16 wheeler from an apoplectic southern sheriff.
I think the ayes have it: Travelin’ Honker-man Dragon.
But then, us former SHSers have always known Rex to be one swift honky.
Damn! RBL beat me to the honky joke. Oh well, at least it got said.
I think it sounds good and seems appropriate is so many ways. It’s nice to know that we aren’t the only culture which changes the names of non-natives so we can speak them easier.
I went to the automatic name generator and I came up with Su Shi Ning. Considering the fact that sushi is my favoritest food like ever! I’m pretty happy with it. According to the site, “shi” means honesty and “ning” means peaceful, repose, and serenity and those certainly seem to fit.
Have fun in China and can’t wait to hear how you guys enjoy your first trip abroad together. Hawaii doesn’t really count as abroad.
SEB: Here is more info on my name and how I got it. My Chinese name was given to me by a Chinese professor who is trained in linguistics and whose father is a semiotician in the PRC (which, you can imagine, wasn’t a good thing to be during the Cultural Revolution).
My Chinese name is Ban Yan-nan and was given to me by a teacher because it sounds vaguely like my last name as it’s pronounced in Thai. Ever since I learned that it’s written in three strokes, I’ve always had a liking for the name Yi Ding.
Mac, do you know the characters for your name? I’m curious about what it means. As for Ding Yi ä¸ä¸€, calligraphically the simplest possible name in Chinese, the sad part is I actually know someone who’s named that. She’s the daughter of the aforementioned Donghong (“The East Is Red”), who perhaps had some reason to be touchy on the subject of names. But honestly, it’s gimmicky, sort of the Chinese equivalent of naming your kid Justin Case or Ima Hogg. People do it a lot, though, if they have family names that lend themselves to commonly used phrases: I know a Chang Qing 常é’, an An Jing 安éœ, etc.
Kerim, what an interesting story about your name. I did wonder about the Turkish first name and the Jewish last name, but living as we do in the land of people named Mahealani Chun-yu Tsukamoto Smith, I wasn’t about to point fingers. Also, after I got done thinking that “en” wasn’t commonly used in naming in the PRC, I had to write a letter to the director of permissions at the Palace Museum in Beijing, whose personal name is Nai’en 乃æ©. So there you go.
My Chinese name was given to me by my teacher as well: Bi4 An1na4. Unfortunately, bi is also known as the derogatory term for a man’s sexual organ, so I’m VERY careful I say it as a fourth tone bi and not a first tone bi (which is the slang term for… yeah). I’ve gotten some interesitng looks with that name, I’m suspecting there must be some other puns or idioms that make it not the best name in the book. I also could translate Bi4 as “score” or “together.”
My fun activity with Chinese-national friends is figuring out if their English name is good translation of their Enlgish. I.e., my friend Jing1 (crystal) has Jenny as her English name, but it could be Crystal if you did a strict translation. Taking into acount English meanings and references, I thought it was too white trash, so I convinced her if she wanted to change her name again, to go with Claire.
西方紅ï¼
å—方紅ï¼