Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Yes, I have a Chinese name. My parents, for some reason, inflicted two different names on both the girls in the family. They gave us English names (Honey and Candy) but then put down Chinese names on our birth certificates and promptly proceeded to pretend the Chinese names didn’t exist. This created quite a bit of confusion on the first day of kindergarten, since the teacher naturally went by what was on the birth certificate. I ended up getting into an argument with the teacher over what constituted my “real” name.

My sister’s story is even funnier. She didn’t know about HER Chinese name until she took a math test in first grade. Her teacher had no idea who this “Honey Tan” was, but she definitely wasn’t registered in the class.

Anyway, most Chinese names have at least two parts to them, not including the family name. Some have three, and some have only one, but the vast majority of the Chinese names will consist of a family name, followed by two other names: Zhang Zi Yi, Chow Yuen Fat, Leung Chiu Wai, Mao Tze Tung, Deng Xiao Ping, etc.

This is because one part of the name is usually a name used for a whole generation of kids. Basically, every boy and girl born to a group of brothers will have a name in common. All my brothers’ sons have names starting with Cheng, for example, while all their daughters’ names start with Kim. The second part of their names is what distinguishes the child within the generation: there can be a Cheng Kin, Cheng Leong, Cheng San, etc.

Note that it’s not always the first part of the name that’s the generational name; I’ve seen people switch it around, too, though from what I’ve observed, using the first name as the generational name is more prevalent.

People familiar with Chinese culture know that these two-part names are usually treated as a unit. If you’re very familiar with the person and want to create a diminutive, you drop the generational name, which makes sense; if you did it the other way around, you’d be calling upwards of a dozen people the same name. So, for example, somebody named Xiao Ming who had Xiao as the generational name may be referred to as Ming, Ming-Ming, or Ah Ming.

People here in Portland find my two-part Chinese name horribly confusing. I hyphenate it to indicate that it should be pronounced as one unit, but people still inevitably try to pronounce only the first part. I try to politely correct people who do this, but some people really, really resent this, occasionally stooping to hostile or snippy comments. I don’t see why it’s treated as such an imposition, because there are similar compound names in English, like Mary-Ann.

I also had a hard time pinpointing why I was so bothered by this. A rose by any other name, etc., right? Then it hit me: it’d be like me calling somebody named Stephen, “Phen,” or somebody named Brian, “Ian"--without their permission, and without knowing them very well.

OK, so I’m taking a long time to make my point, and my point is this: different cultures have different methods of creating diminutive forms of names. And when a name from a certain culture or time period isn’t given the proper diminutive, it can really jar on the ears.

Take, for example, my French friend, Edouard. Some of his American friends call him Ed, sometimes even Eddie baby, which makes me laugh, mostly because it sounds so WRONG. On the other hand, a very French diminutive (albeit one that would probably only be used on a little kid), Dou-Dou, makes me laugh even harder. But this is a pretty good illustration of how diminutives sometimes focus on the stressed syllable.

And once you get into the sort of diminutive where letters are added or completely changed in a name instead of merely trimming away syllables, things get a whole lot more complicated. How Daisy became a diminutive for Margaret and Dick for Richard is still something I have yet to puzzle out, but some, like Nicky or Colette from Nicole, are less difficult to figure out.

And as anyone who’s read Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy can tell you, Russians have their own system of diminutives, and they’re not afraid of inflicting four of five different ones on the same person, some of them not resembling the original name at all, therefore making you feel like a right a dumbass when you realize a few dozen pages down the line that this character you totally thought was somebody else was one of the major characters.

I think this is all a very long-winded way to say: if you want to write about a foreign culture or a different time period, try to get the diminutives right.

Yeah, I realize this is nitpicky shit. Most people probably don’t care, but when used correctly, it really adds an authentic flavor to the prose, and when used wrongly, my OCD self tends to pick on it and pick on it and not let it alone, le sigh. And y’all know how much wiser it is to keep me happy.