Learn Chinese online - What's in a name? Quite a lot, actually

Opinion / Liang Hongfu

What's in a name? Quite a lot, actually
By Hong Liang (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-05-30 06:24

Hi folks, I have a new byline. All I have done was to drop one character
from my name. It's something I have wanted to do for a long time and this
is as good a time as ever.

You see it's that last character "fu" in my name that has been troubling
me since I was a kid at school. It's not a bad word. In fact, "fu" is one
of the most auspicious words in the Chinese lexicon. It can literally be
translated to mean good fortune, happiness or blessing.

Many Chinese families paste paper cuts of the character, usually bright
red, on their front doors during Chinese New Year to invite the god of
fortune into their homes. Some particularly eager families make a point
of pasting the character upside down to signify the arrival of good
fortune.

In my clan, all male members of my generation carry that character in
their names. There must be more than a hundred of us "fus" living in
different cities all over the world. I don't know what the others think
about their names. As for me, having the word "fu" in my name is anything
but a blessing.

From day one in school, every kid I knew called me "ah fu," which, in
Cantonese, is downright derogatory. It is a nickname reserved for dimwits
surviving on pure luck.

My middle name "Hong," by the way, means big, which often tends to
heighten my embarrassment. A "big fu" in Cantonese means a stupid sucker.

Since then, I had to put up with that nickname with resignation as if I
was born with it. I have always suspected that people who knew me only by
my nickname actually thought that I was a little, well, dense.

I am not being schizophrenic. We Cantonese have a saying which can be
loosely translated to mean that a nickname is worth a thousand words in
describing one's true personality. In my case, at least, such
generalization certainly does not apply.

As I grew up, I started to learn to laugh off attempts by those
particularly vicious schoolmates to make fun of my name. Those were,
after all, crude but, nevertheless, harmless boys' jokes. Quite a few of
them got stuck with nicknames with even more embarrassing connotations
than mine.

My name trouble took on an entirely new dimension when I started to date.
Girls can be merciless with boys, especially those with funny nicknames.
Adopting an English name seemed the right thing to do. It was fashionable
too.

After a great deal of research and thought, I announced to my friends
that from then on, I was to be called James, in honour of the 18th
Century English explorer Captain James Cook, one of my boyhood heroes. My
friends were not impressed. They kept calling me by my nickname.

My hang-ups with my nickname disappeared when I went to work for an
English-language daily newspaper in Hong Kong. Most of my colleagues
there were either foreigners or thoroughly Westernized Hong Kong Chinese.
They knew me only by my anglicized name.

Since then, I have felt that I was free from the nuisance associated with
my name. But I have never quite given up the idea of giving my name some
kind of a facelift. I haven't done it simply because I couldn't think of
something that I liked.

Many Chinese Americans are fond of dropping one word from their
three-word names. I, of course, know exactly which word to drop from
mine. But my middle name in Cantonese sounds as flat as stale soda. So, I
just let the idea rest.

Although I have been using my pinyin byline for many months, it never
occurred to me that the combination of my middle name and family name
could jive so well. Then I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on
one of my recent columns. She didn't give any advice on a change of name.
But she dropped the "fu" from my name, most probably by mistake. I read
it out loud and loved the way it sounds.

From now on, please call me Hong Liang.

Email: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/30/2006 page4)

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