From: clipper@mccarthy.csd.uwo.ca (Khun Yee Fung)
Subject: The Chinese Name
Organization: Department of Computer Science, The University of Western
	Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 23:07:39 GMT

What is a Chinese name? Do all Chinese have Chinese names? Are there
non-Chinese with Chinese names? Where did the names come from? Where
are they going?

Mostly, I don't know. And I don't know enough to draw any conclusions.
I can only share some tidbits which may not even be accurate. I hope
you don't mind.

I have no idea what a Chinese name is. In my department, there are
three people with the same surname, Hong in pinyin. But the spellings
of their surnames in English are different. One is Hong, one Hung, and
one Fung. I am the Fung. The Hung is a Cantonese. The Hong a Korean.
When I was in high school, there was one Fong and one Ang.  Can you
tell who was what before I told you? I don't think so. It can be more
confusing.  Huang and Wang are two very popular Chinese surnames. In
Cantonese, both spell Wong. But there are also Wee, Vee, Ng, Eng, Ing,
etc. in other dialects. The other wonderful surname is Chen. It is
also Chin, Chan, Tan, Tran, etc.

How about the surnames Hu and Fu. Both mean foreigner. So is a Chinese
with surname Hu a Chinese? One of my friends just got married with a
Fu who says he is not Han. He is a Miao. He is a Chinese though, born,
raised, and educated in China.

Then we have the Chinese muslims. Many of them have surname Ma to
honor Prophet Mohammed. Is that a Chinese surname then? And all
buddhist monks are supposed to have the surname Shi to honor Buddha
who is transliterated to ShiJiaMoNi (I don't know why). Buddha was not
a Chinese. He was a Hindu.  I don't know whether Taoist monks have
surname Lao (but then his surname was probably not Lao but Li,
historians cannot decide).

Then the Manchus. So everybody knows the name of the last emperor of
China is PuYi. So his surname is Pu? No. He has a Manchu surname which
is rather long and I have no idea what the original pronounciation is
but the Chinese transliteration is AiSingJuaLo. I wonder how many
people in Manchuria have surname more than a character now.

Where did they come from? Everywhere it seems. From place names. But
this is circular. My father's hometown in China is called Fung's
Hamlet. So that is why my surname is Fung? No, my ancestors came to
that place and called it that name. But my name was still derived from
a place name. However, it was changed rather long ago because an
emperor had the same character in his name and my ancestors were
ordered to change their surname. So they changed it to another
character which means the same thing and has the same pronounciation,
in Hakka and Mandarin (but not in Cantonese although the GuangDong
province is where my ancestral (the less ancient one. The more ancient
one I have no idea where) home town is).

Every Chinese once living outside North America knows that Chinese has
their surname first and given name second everywhere except in North
America. But it was not exactly so long time ago. The surname of a
woman was at the end.  To muddle the whole thing a bit more, the place
a woman came from was then placed in the beginning. So if she had
three characters in her name, the first character is the place she
came from, the third her surname and the middle her given name. But
sometimes it is nice to have some of them having their husband's name
as their name. So the first character is the place she came from, the
middle the surname of her husband, and the last character her own
surname.

One name is confusing enough? They used to have two surnames. What the
differences? I have no idea. But I do know everybody also had three
given names. One is a one-character name. One a two-character name.
And then the third I don't know what. The one-character name is the
formal name. The two-character name was used by the family. The last
one is basically what you like to be known, to your best friends.
Maybe, I don't know.

Does every Chinese have one-character surname? No. People with
two-character surnames are fewer and fewer nowsaday but there must
still be quite many. Many of these two-word surnames were from the
names of official positions. And some are really odd.

Then the lucky people who were ordered by an emperor to have the same
surname as the royal family. Must be a huge honor back then. Except if
they lived at the end of a dynasty they might get massacred alongside
the royal family.

Are Chinese names inherited? I don't even know what that sentence
means. There used to be a custom to have one son of a family to have
the surname of his mother if his mother's side needed a son to carry
the family's name (boy, what a logic). So he had his mother's surname
and would inherit the fortune of his mother's family, so not really a
bad deal.

Each generation of a family also has a fixed word for the generational
name. Usually it is put into the two-character given name. But not
always. The whole thing may be a poem. The first generation has the
first character of that peom, the second generation the second
character, etc. When the poem is finished, the first character of the
poem is used again.  My father's generational name is Chang but it was
not put into his name. I don't know what my generational name is
because the book containing it was lost. So instead, my father named
all of us with a `Yee' suffix. But it is a confusing business because
for some families, the generational character is not given to girls.
Just for boys. For some, each sex has a different generational name.
For some, they have never heard of such a thing.

Many Chinese have a Christian or Western name now. It was rather
common to name one's children in some way to show the religion of the
family. So En was common for Christians when I was young. From the
names I used to be able to guess what the family religion was.

Nowadays so many people do not know Chinese enough to give a Chinese
name that they simply give a Western name to a child. In Malaysia and
Singapore this is not very nice because sometimes a Chinese name is
expected if you fill in Chinese in the Race column. So the names are
very strange. For some iliterate people whose time was taken
completely to fence for day-to-day survival, their children have names
like Smalldog, Piglet, etc.

Of course, in many countries, Chinese change their names to blend in
better, to avoid discrimination, to have a local name, or whatever.
The reason is not important. Many Chinese in Indonesia, Philipines,
Burma, and Thailand have local surnames. From their surnames it is
impossible to know whether they are Chinese or not. Some of them don't
like it. One of my classmates in high school has an Indonesian name
that she had to use in official occasions. She did not like it because
nobody could pronouce it correctly and it made her stand out. I
suppose having a Chinese name in Indonesia would make her stand out
too.

And on the other hand, how good your Chinese is does not prevent
wonderful mixups in names because a English name is also compulsory in
this English-speaking world. Well, it so happened that the nurses that
transliterated the Chinese names to English could be different. We
were the lucky bunch.  My sisters and brothers and me used to have
different spellings for our father's and mother's names. Not very much
different, missing one g here and one more h there that it was
confusing when our school had to sort out who was the brother of who
so they could notify the other if something happened to one. My father
got around to apply for new birth certificates for us all that it is
rather nice to have the same set of parents officially as well as in
reality. (No, they did not have birth certificates because China did
not issue birth certificates at that time and Japan planes bombed my
mother's home town to ashes.  Many stories about birth certificates
and life under Japanese occupation but that later.) And naturally,
English sensibilities prevented them from having a column in the birth
certificate to record down the Chinese names of the children and
parents.

English transliterations of Chinese surnames can be fun. How do you
pronouce Ng? Even better, how do you pronouce Thng? Well, my own name
has a wonderful Yee inside too. Instead of having no vowels, Yee, a
very common transliteration for a bunch of characters, has three
vowels and no consonants.

Yes, finally, my name. Both Khun and Yee are the names of precious
stones.  How precious? I don't even know what stones they are. Most
dictionaries don't even have the Khun in them. The Yee, they say
beautiful jade but that we already know. My father named us all after
some jades, stones, and adjective of jades or stones.  And by the way
the `h' in Khun is silent. Why there is a h you have to ask the nurse
who transliterated my name for my parents.

So, what is in a Chinese name?

Khun Yee
--
Khun Yee Fung    clipper@csd.uwo.ca
Department of Computer Science
Middlesex College
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
Canada N6A 5B7
Tel: (519) 661-6889
Fax: (519) 661-3515
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american