Expat Focus - Living in China

Foreigners now start to drop names

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-09 15:27

My friends Dirty Law, Dust Language and Silky Smooth aren't who you're thinking they are - that is, they're not young Chinese who have picked amusing English appellations.

While much ado has been made about Chinese youths' tendency of picking colorful English names - my wife's university student roster includes Duckmonster (Duckmon for short), Summer Wine and Teabag - few from overseas realize it sometimes works the other way as well.

This gaggle of young foreigners with funny forms of address also wanted flamboyant designations but were disgruntled with the flat-sounding monikers they were given by their Chinese friends.

Most newly arrived expats hope for a Dances With Wolves sort of experience in which local friends observe an outstanding attribute in our personalities and name us accordingly in Chinese. But, overwhelmingly, Chinese choose for their overseas pals appellations based on their birth names' transliterations, many of which are standardized.

So every Mike who comes to China almost invariably becomes Mai Ke - written as the character for "grain" followed by the one for "subdue". Mike's moniker is quite literally a textbook case, as this is perhaps the most common foreign male name found in Chinese-language study workbooks, after Ma Ke (Horse Subdue) for Mark.

"I don't want to be called barley," Mike said, and decided to make a name for himself that separates the wheat from the chaff. So, he scrolled through his electronic Chinese-English dictionary until he found characters also pronounced Mai Ke with a bit more grit and authority - Dirty Law.

The advantage foreigners have in selecting their own Chinese names according to transliterations is that Chinese is full of homophones. A search in Ktdict+ C-E translation software brings up 39 characters for "ke", most of which have several meanings.

Mike settled upon "Law" as his given name after considering going by "Dirty Axe Handle", "Dirty Tadpole" and "Dirty To Woof".

Silky Smooth, a German-American university student whose Chinese instructor had turned his birth name Leo into Su Li (Awakening Powerful), also had a tough time deciding which homophones to go with.

For Su, he had mulled over "Dried Fish", "Pot of Cooked Rice" and "Tremble With Fear". And for Li, he pondered "Drip", "Dregs of Wine" and "Severe".

The exceptionally tall, hulking fellow went with Silky Smooth, which sounds like either a very bad hip-hop stage name or a very good chocolate bar advertising slogan. He picked this translation of Su Li "because I'm a big guy but I'd rather jive my way through life", he says. "And I think it's definitely something you could put on a business card."

Our friend Evan had already swapped his standardized translation of Ai Wen - "Love Language" - for one with the same phonetics meaning "Dust Language".

His reason?

"Love is stupid, dude."

But when pressed he explains the real reason for the swap is that Love Language would be just too clich a name for an English teacher in China. So he enlisted a local buddy who majors in ancient Chinese to help him select another appellation.

As these foreigners opt for oft-zany Chinese monikers, they claim they're doing it in the name of better cross-cultural communication - or at least fun. I guess it just depends on what you call it ... and what you call them.