Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 4:53 PM Subject: Re: Fw:Re: Mommy, what's an intellectual?
> Michael, sadly my wife (who you will remember is
> Chinese and was a member of the Young Communist League
> in China) reports that this is true. Just the other
> night, she was telling me about someone she knows
> whose parents named her the chinese equivalent of
> Love The Peoples Army! She wasn't joking! I mean you
> have to be on the level of fanaticism of well...Louis
> Proyect to name your own child something like that!!!!
>
So for those of you who are interested and don't know it:
1) Chinese names are not like English names. Chinese names are virtually all common (or not so common) everyday (or not so everyday) WORDS that can be used in contexts other than naming people. To illustrate - when my wife is looking for inspiration for the Chinese name of our baby, she doesn't get out some book of babies' names - she just gets out any old ordinary Chinese dictionary and leafs through it. Take the name (Cantonese pronunciation) 'gwok wing' - literally, 'nation glory', 'The Glory of the Nation'. This name is not unusual. My own (purely decorative, me being a gweilo) Chinese name is something like 'summer glory'. That's not what it 'means', that's what it SAYS. This system of using ordinary words to create names is probably also what gives rise to the often slightly bizaare English 'names' Hong Kong people choose for themselves, e.g. girls whose English names are things like Apple Wong or Health Cheung.
Names are also often given in reference to a particular theme, often some desired virtue or aspect such as righteousness, strength of character, beauty and so on. The name given above (gwok wing) shows that 'patriotic' references are not uncommon in Chinese names.
So given the way Chinese names actually work, it isn't as odd as we Westerners think it is to call someone the equivalent of 'Love the Peoples' Army'. Quite a lot of Chinese names have (somewhat more antique) patriotic meanings. Choosing such a name would seem to be just one variation on an established way of naming people.
2) Once upon a time the PLA was considered to have a high degree of legitimacy. This was even the case outside of China right up until just before Tiananmen (anybody remember getting in arguments to the effect that nothing bad was going to happen because this was the "People's" army?) This was the only army in modern times to have united China (let's leave Taiwan out of it for the moment) and moved it, temporarily, out from under the foreign boot (compare the 'Nationalists' and the whole country being plundered ...) You don't think most Chinese people would have regarded that as something to be proud of? How would you like your country openly shat on by arrogant foreigners for a more than a century (ah, poor China - already starting to get a rerun of this, with her own elite actively participating in some new scheme of plunder ...) Again, for this reason the name doesn't seem to involve 'fanaticism' at all. National pride, yes.
Eric Leher