Who named you?
Yesterday, I met a girl called Cordelia. I also know a couple of girls called Renee, but the one I spoke with yesterday (Renee of MPH) and Cordelia both said they had been named by their fathers.
Now, that’s quite a new concept to me - to have Chinese fathers give English names to their children. And not just any English name, but what to me are “exotic” names.
You see, I come from an older generation of born-in-Malaysia Chinese whose parents are Chinese educated. Therefore, my parents wouldn’t have given me an English name. Instead, they gave me a Chinese name. Actually, I think it was my grandfather who named me. In fact, he named all his grandchildren. Well, at least part of our names.
You see, he had a book in which he’d written guidelines on what “generation” name to give to his children and grandchildren.
His male grandchildren all have the name “Neng” as their generation name which is their second name. Then they all have their own unique first name. The name “Neng” means “ability” . My brother probably has the best name among the male grandchildren. Translated, his name means “has ability” . No, wait - one cousin has the better name which, translated, means “many abilities” .
My grandfather’s female grandchildren (me, included) were given the name “Mooi” as our generation name which, like the boys’, is also our second name. The word “Mooi” is one part of the Chinese name for plum blossom.
In school, I used to get laughed at for my second name. This was because in those days, school textbooks were beginning to be localised (i.e., using local names, etc.). Some names were more common than others (much like the English “Tom, Dick and Harry” ), and these included Ali and Ahmad for the Malays, and Muthu and Samy for the Indians. Well, for the Chinese, the two most common names often seen in school textbooks were Ah Kow (male) and Ah Mooi (female). In fact, one of the most common stories had Ah Kow and Ah Mooi as dulang washers in the tin mining industry. So the name Ah Mooi was common and became quite a “common” (as in low-class) name. If you said your name was Ah Mooi, you were likely to be laughed at. So that was my situation. And along the way, like most girls my age, I took on “Christian” (i.e., English) names. I had two - one given by a good friend of the family when I was about 7, which I abandoned in my teens in favour of something I chose for myself, and which in fact was the name I was baptised with. But no, I won’t tell what these two names are, since they are no longer a part of my life now. But I will tell that when a colleague learned what my baptised name was, she commented that she liked my “Chet” better. So do I. And I hope she still does.
Actually, I wasn’t named Chet at birth. At least, not the Chinese character for Chet. I was actually called “Kit” . But as a baby, I was often sick, and one day, one of our family’s elderly female relatives took my Chinese name on a piece of paper to a fortune teller who pronounced that it had too much “water” in it. And true enough, the Chinese character for my name does have a “water” element in it, since it means “clean” or “to clean” (water = clean). So the family had to look for an alternative to “Kit” which didn’t sound too different when said in Cantonese. And they found my eventual name, Chet, which has a “sun” element in it, which they said will dry up whatever “water” is in my life. Whether there’s any truth in that, I did become less sickly after my name change.
And what does my name “Chet” mean? It’s part of a two-character term meaning “learned” . So put together, my full Chinese name is supposed to mean “learned flower” .
Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have lived up to my given Chinese name.
Never mind, lah. Chet is still such a cool name.
