What is in a Name?

If you are in your mid-twenties or older than chances are you have friends, family, and co-workers your age having babies. Usually the top question asked is, "Do you have names picked out?" In China they don't ask this question. Why? Because they have...

*Astrology*

I thought it was really interesting and will share my very basic knowledge on the subject. 

In Western culture we typically name children after relatives or after religious figures. Even if you aren't religious, there is a good chance your name is related to the Old or New Testaments of the Bible (John, Luke, Mark, Sarah, Mary, Elizabeth as a few examples). 

In the Chinese culture, names are picked out based on the year, month, day, and time that a child is born. A baby could be named as late as a month after being born. If you are familiar with the Zodiac years you will know that there are 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac and each year is related to an animal. 2018 is the dog and 2019 is the pig. 

The animals are rabbit, tiger, rooster, dragon, snake, mouse, pig, sheep, monkey, dog, ox, and horse.

Then the year is broken up into the five elements of nature: earth, wood, fire, water, and metal. Fall season is metal, winter is water, spring is wood, summer is fire, and earth is between seasons (The Five Elements).

Then on each day there is a specific item related to that element. I tried finding a calendar online that had a comprehensive list of what each day relates to what element and all I could find were fortune telling websites where it wanted me to pay money. The closest I could get was this chart below. In fact, most Chinese people will go see a psychic who can tell them the names they should pick based on the Five Elements Calendar. 

This is also where the idea of Chinese medicine comes from

HOWEVER I do have a friend who was named based on this theory and this is what she told me. 

My friend was born during the wood element season and on her specific day was the day of the forest. Then the hour she was born was during the cedar tree. So her name means Girl of the Cedar Forest. She told me that there is a belief that being named after an element that is the opposite of the day you were born brings permanent bad luck. If her family named her after a fire element when she was born on the cedar forest day, she could be in deep crap right now...according to this idea. 

If you ever get a chance to be an English teacher, then you will sometimes be asked to give people an English name. I got to name a lot of my first grade students and a few people's babies. I try my best to translate the Chinese name to an English name but it is nearly impossible to get it right. 

My best example story is a woman who asked me to name her daughter. When I asked what her daughter's name meant it was something along the lines of, "Girl of serenity and strength of a great and deep lake." I told her we don't have names that could incorporate all those meanings but could get one of those. I offered the names Marissa (means ocean), Audra (strength), or Serenity (take a wild guess). She was really disappointed that I couldn't get all the meanings in and decided to wait on giving her daughter an English name. 

Usually when I name Chinese people I try to go by the sound if the meaning is something that doesn't translate well. For example if the name sounds like Jia then I might name them Jaiden or Jay. 

I have noticed that some Chinese people who choose to name themselves might make simple mistakes or not realize that the name sounds odd to a Western person. 

For example, not all names are gendered in China so they may choose a typical boy/girl name without realizing. 

Real names that I have encountered: Carol for a boy. Rex for a girl. Both have now changed their names. Now they are Carter and Abigail. 

Or they may pick a name that sounds cool but seem silly to Westerners. 

Real names that I have encountered: Boom, Poker, Hulk. 

Chinese people usually want an English name because their names are hard to pronounce for those who don't speak the language. You can read it about it in this blog post!  They would rather choose an English name they chose than have a person continue to mess up their real name-which is sad and we can go into the colonial implications of all that later but that is the short version of why they want English names. 

But guess what? Sometimes Westerners will be given a Chinese name! I do have a Chinese name which I got written on a stamp. The name they gave wasn't based on the calendar but based on the sound of my name (just like I name my Chinese kids). It is pronounced zhuo shi (kind of like Chelsea). The name means "exquisite poetry" which makes sense for an English teacher!

What is in a name? As Juliet would say, if we called rose by any other name it would smell just as sweet but maybe translating the Chinese name Graceful Rose of Wonderful Serenity into an English name would just lose some of that wonderful context. So I hope being called just Rose is okay and all the rest of the meaning can be gotten through personality. 

Source:

The Five Elements (Wu Xing). (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/astrology/five-elements.htm