A Chinese culture mix-up

When my niece (in-law) Carolyn read the blog entry about our day in the city with Mark’s co-worker from China she was excited to think that she might be able to get some authentic help with finding a Chinese middle name for her soon-to-be-adopted-from-China baby girl. She was finding ‘naming’ in Chinese to be a bit of a challenge because of the nuances of this very difficult (for us) language. The name had to have the right meaning, and the written form had to be accurate Chinese characters (for the quilt and the album and the wall hangings and all the other wonderful stuff we make for our darling babies that features their names…) Anyway, finally they had picked out a name and matching Chinese characters and wanted to ask Dawei if the characters were right for the name, and if the name meant what they thought it did. OK – should be simple…

Maybe it was our own ‘transposition of the problem space,’ or maybe Dawei just had a different notion of how you name a baby, or maybe we just got caught in that “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing” problem, but before we knew it, the simple request had become a bit complicated.

Dawei’s first response was that it seemed like the name had been picked out of a book. Well, yes, how else would an American couple pick out a Chinese name? Isn’t that pretty much how we go about picking American names too? Oh well. Not so, the Chinese, I guess. It appeared that the first choice was, to Dawei, an ‘old fashioned’ name – used in excess in the 70s but not much in use now. So suddenly we’ve stepped a bit away from ‘information’ to ‘taste.’ But our interest was piqued so we gave him the additional information that the intent was to find a ‘flower’ name, like the other little girls in the family had for their middle names – like ‘Rose.’

Well, at this point, I think Dawei’s own interest was piqued and he was determined to give this baby the perfect name himself. He needed to know the baby’s last name, “so it will go with the middle name” leaving us wondering how any Chinese names could go with ‘Jester’ but, you know, we were in to it for the long haul by now, so…

By this time Carolyn and I had been exchanging a flurry of emails and she mentioned that there was a hint in what she had learned that the name had to be ‘balanced’ or something – that there are numbers to names that had to 'add up.' Or something. Huh? (I’m not sure I got that right, but it doesn’t really matter, at this point!) So she provided a list of the other names under consideration, along with their corresponding ‘numbers.’ Mark showed this to Dawei. “No numbers,” he said. “Numbers not important.” More thought.

The next day inspiration had struck our Chinese friend. “Xiulan,” correct Chinese character drawn, would be perfect.

Now here is where the English communication got a bit mixed. I thought Mark said that the English translation for Xiulan was “Shirley Temple.” Sarah Shirley Temple Jester, she would be.

(A pause here… to let you think about that one a bit, especially in light of the fact that the first name suggested was deemed “old fashioned” from the 70s…)

Additionally, Mark said, there is a Shirley Temple Rose, registered with the rose society. Does that make things any more clear?

But it turns out that the Chinese hold our dear Shirley in considerable esteem and that Xiulan is simply the Chinese name they gave her – evidently along the line of ‘Beautiful Flower’ or something - instead of the actual translation of ‘Shirley Temple’ from English to Chinese.

Really, at this point, Mark and I are reluctant to ask any more questions, fearing an inadvertent cultural ‘slight’ to our new friend, after he obviously put so much care into his selection. (We hope we haven’t committed him to be the godfather or something!) So sure was he that he had found the perfect name, that we can’t really go back to him and say “well, OK, but, getting back to the original question…” We may never know.

Maybe we can find someone a little less ‘new’ from China to help.

(Thank you, Carolyn, for giving me permission to tell the tale!)