Names
When our daughter came to us she came with three things: the clothes she was wearing, her birthday, and her name.
That’s it.
To my thinking, we couldn’t completely take her name from her. She has so little that comes from her life before her new family, we didn’t feel it was something we could take from her.
So we used her Chinese name as her middle name. The first couple of days she was with us we called her by the name that she was used to being called. We then started calling her by the name we had chosen for her along with her name from the orphanage. By the time we came home we were exclusively using her new name, and she was fine with that. Had she not been fine with it then we would have respected her feelings and continued with her original name.
And then we get to pronunciation. I’m sure it’s perfectly okay to pronounce it in the standard dialect, but my own sentimentality made me want to pronounce it the way whoever named her would have pronounced it. And that meant finding out how someone in that province would pronounce her name. So, my suggestion is to ask someone from your child’s province how to pronounce her name, and to also request that they help you learn to say it right – tone and all. Maybe it’s one of your facilitators, maybe it’s the hotel concierge late at night when he isn’t busy – but if your sentimentality kicks in like mine did then try to make it someone who is from that province.
And if you aren’t sentimental about it then at least get a native speaker to help you with pronunciation. You don’t want your child to tell someone her Chinese name only to be laughed at because she is pronouncing her own name wrong. And if the person she tells happens to be a boy in her sixth grade class whose parents and grandparents still speak Chinese in their home then he is quite likely to laugh at her.
Now that my daughter is older I sometimes wish we’d given her two middle names so that she could use a western sounding middle name during the years she is uncomfortable with her Chinese’ness. It seems that most kids go through a period of time that they want as far away from anything Chinese as they can get, and during that time I don’t want her to feel that she has to hide her middle name. We will cross that bridge when we come to it. Perhaps she can use my middle name during that time period if she chooses to. It will all be her choice, with me supporting her in her choices as best I can while asking as many questions as I can to try to help her find her own answers.
I have a secret hope that the daughter we are waiting for will have a name that somehow fits with her big sister’s name. In a traditional Chinese family the siblings would have the same generational name. I know we aren’t a traditional family, but part of me still wants that connection for them. I’m still working on a solution to that one.
May 4th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
Kids can use pretty much any name they want. I have a 17 year old son who was given a legal name that is 24 letters long. Much too long for any Kindergardener to write. So he modified it on his own and has gone all the way through school without any trouble at all.
Our daughter has no Chinese middle name. Naming is a very personal decision and we decided that her name wasn’t very significant since it didn’t come from her birth parents. At many orphanages, the babies are assigned a name based on the month they’re found. Several children actually have exactly the same name! We like the sound of her Chinese name and, oddly enough, our 2nd daughter shares the same Chinese name, so we’ll throw it in as a nickname for both of them and let them decide if they want to make it “legal” later.
Donna
May 4th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
I meant to say that I’d never consider any other persons decision to keep the Chinese name as “insignificant”. It’s a personal choice and I totally understand all of the excellent reasons to do it either way.
:)
Donna
May 6th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
It’s interesting how you mention the generational name, because I have been contemplating this as well. I don’t imagine I’ll be lucky enough for it to just happen, but I think it would be very nice for my girls to have a generational name as well. My daughters name that would be the “generational” name is Fu (meaning good luck, happiness, blessing) and I’m rather partial to it, but yet the idea of altering my daughter-to-be’s name doesn’t seem quite right either, guess I’ll wait and see what her name is. If you come up with a good idea please share it. Thanks
Pam
June 19th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
I have seen that some children from orphanages are given very generic names in Chinese (and the second part of the name is identical for all children in that orphanage), so if I give my daughter a Chinese name, it will not be some random one that the orphanage chose. It might be possible to keep the same sound and choose more meaningful Characters, however.
Also having a long name myself and dealing with the ridicule as a child, I really don’t plan to burden my child with a 4 or 5 part name, but I can understand if people would want to do that, so they can have all 3 names and then add a Chinese name which might be 2 parts.
Another idea is to take the Chinese meaning of the Characters in your child’s name and convert it to an “English” middle name. If the name means “Bright” for instance, you can use a Baby name site and find a girl’s name “Berwyn” for it. You can say then “this is the way you write your name in Chinese” and it would be correct.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
My husband bought a book called mei mei (little sister), which consists of portraits taken in a Chinese orphanage. The photos are beautiful, but also quite sad (particularly that of a 4 or 5 year old “new arrival”, flanked by two policemen).
Anyway, at the back of the book, all the children are credited (in Mandarin and English) and of the 100+ names on the page, no two are the same. Of course this is just one of many orphanages, but I think we should be careful about assuming that names are just pulled from the air, or repeatedly assigned. It makes sense that an orphanage would assign the same last name to all the children in it’s care (we do it in our families) and who knows, maybe it will help someone find a former orphanage friend one day.
I’d bet that in almost any American kindergarden class, there are a few kids who share the name of a fellow classmate, and chances are, their parents even chose them randomly…