What's in a name?

For awhile now I’ve been racking my brain over what to call myself when I get to Beijing. I mean a name is kind of a big deal right? I’ve had friends who, whether by mistake or choice, ended up going by completely different names when they went to a new country or school. I myself have gone by different nicknames throughout the course of my life (and 3^rd year rotations, attending dependent). Plus my English name is kind of hard for Chinese people to pronounce. So, you may ask, why not go by your Chinese name, didn’t you attend 8+ years of Chinese school? To this I would respond…what Chinese name?

You see for those of you who don’t know, a lot of effort goes in to making sure that a Chinese name is just perfect. Chinese names usually consist of the last name and then two characters. Each character has a meaning, whether it’s elegance or intelligence or something like that. The number of strokes in each character is important, as is the total number of strokes in the whole name. The sound has to be pleasing to the ear. Often children in the same family are given similar sounding names to highlight their relation. If you mess up in choosing a Chinese name, your kid could be screwed forever (she’ll never get into that ivy league school now!). My dad was thinking so hard about all these things that he had not yet formulated the perfect names for me and my sister before we started Chinese school.

This led to some humorous incidents. For example… My sister plays the violin. As a kid she won 3^rd place in our Chinese school’s violin competition (which is pretty impressive given that all the kids in Chinese school play violin). So to honor the winners, our school decided to hang a big banner with the winner’s names (in Chinese of course). But alas! My sis didn’t have a Chinese name! So in her place it just said our last name and then “???” in nice big text at the front of the school.

When this happened, my mom decided enough was enough. She figured any name was better than no name, so she translated our names phonetically into Chinese. These led to functional names which we used in school. However, we ended up with names that didn’t mean anything, sounded weird to Chinese people, and didn’t really sound like our English names either.

Finally when my sister graduated from medical school, she told my dad as a grad present she either wanted her Chinese name (how would she succeed otherwise?), or a cannondale bicycle. He gave us the names.

Of course, being 22 at the time he gave me the name and never using it, I promptly forgot it (whoops). So recently, I’ve been thinking, should I take my old phonetic name, ask dad for the one he thought about for 22 years or come up with a new one of my own.

I decided to use the one dad worked on for so many years. Maybe I’ll help me succeed.

:) m