A Lotus by any other name... (The meaning of Chinese names)

I mentioned my Chinese name in an earlier blog - it is Poh Lin.  Just so you are saying it right in your head (unlike the registrar at my starter wedding - should have known when she mispronounced it every single time) - "Poh" is p-oh (or like Po the Teletubby)...Lin is just Lin.  ...and a Teletubby is a big improvement on how people usually pronounce it!

A quick digression here - while I gave up telling people my middle name because no-one could pronounce it (I even changed it to Pauline at one point to avoid getting into the explanation), my dad on the other hand seemed to take great joy in having people mis-pronounce "Fook".  It's not a tasteless "Austin Powers" joke. Dad's name, pronounced to rhyme with "hook" is Fook Wah, with his brothers being Fook Wing, Fook Foo and Fook Kui.  The closest translation of "Fook" is "Fortune", and "Wah" meaning harmony.  My dad drew the line as a teacher though, telling his students that F stood for "Frank".

My dad, his parents, his brothers and their amah 

Anyway, I remember always being slightly curious that my dad's brothers had the same prefix, but then so did my cousins - they are Kwong Wai and Kwong Chong.  Being brothers that was probaby not too unusal either.  But then I found out that all my female cousins have the prefix of Poh - Poh Seng, Poh Meng, Poh Cheng and Poh Chang.  Poh, as I've said means "precious"  (Lin means Lotus).

Can you believe I only got round to asking my dad over dinner last week why we all had the same prefix?!  It is apparently a tradition decided by the grandparents to "name" a generation - therefore one would expect all the children of my dad and his brothers to have the prefix "Kwong" for the boys and "Poh" for the girls.

I guess it's not too dissimilar to having a family name passed down, or the first born son having the father's first name as a middle name, and the second having the father's middle name.

My husband and I have made a conscious decision not to have children, but given that he also has a family name which is passed down, I would imagine any child of ours would have to have 5 names!  (First name, "Middle" name, Chinese name, Family name, surname...and given that I kept my maiden name for professional purposes, a double-barrelled surname wouldn't be too far a leap.) 

Such is the nature of tradition.

Incidentally, my mum's middle name is Tiam Neo (meaning "little lady"), but she (Maureen), as well as my grandmother (Betty (Elizabeth)), and myself (Audrey - and indeed my cousins in the UK) have English names  - my dad doesn't...dammit, I wish I'd asked about that too!