Help with my chinese name

[avathar]

Hello all,

My name is Andy Eming, i'm a chinesse who has lived for many generations in Indonesia, but for some reason, my father stop giving his children a chinese name... but now, i want to have one, cause I still feel that i'm a chinese.

so, i need some help and advice for my chinese name, since i'm not quite good at chinese language... for information, my grandfather's name is Ong Eng Pin, and my father name is Ong Beng Liang, sorry if i write the pinyin wrong, but i guess it is already correct...

when i ask my mother, my name should be Ong Hai .... is it correct? cause i think my surname is Ong and my middle name should be Hai... please post your opinion and advice.. (add the meaning of the name too if possible)

xie xie...

[dalaowai]

Are you planning on learning Chinese? If yes, I would recommend waiting until you've studied long enough to understand the meaning.

I've been in China for over 3 years and only now do I have a Chinese name. I went through 3 different names before finding one that suited me.

My first name was a direct phonetic translation, the second was given by colleagues and the third was created by myself.

Good luck

[Shadowdh]

You could also ask someone who speaks Chinese and you respect to help you... someone who might know you quite well... This would give them a better indication of what your Chinese name might be...

[Jose]

According to this wikipedia article, Ong is the Hokkien equivalent of Mandarin Wang, so your Chinese surname should be 王 (it could also be 汪, though).

As for Hai, which your mother says is your Chinese name (if I understand you correctly), it is impossible to figure out what particular character that stands for. Have you asked your mother what, if anything, it is supposed to mean?

[Long Zhiren]

it is impossible to figure out what particular character that stands for.

Actually, it may be possible. If you can look up a Chinese genealogist, the given names along your paternal family tree may correspond with a naming system. For more clues, look up the names of the 堂兄弟 (and the sisters) of yours and of your father's and of your father's father, etc. Put those names in order, generation by generation, line by line and you should have part of a poem assembled. Now the trick is to identify the poem.

Your father or his 堂兄弟, especially the eldest sons will probably be better informed than people on your mother's side. The eldest sons were supposed to steward the name trees. Since the women didn't propagate family names, they may have had less reason to care.

The Chinese culture is one of the last on the planet to use such naming systems. The Koreans were also among the last and used many of the same poems. If you can find a good Korean genealogist, he/she may be able to help you too. These genealogists typically have most of the poems memorized and can therefore tell you the names of everybody in your family--born, unborn or never born.

Fortunately for you, if you are an n-th generation Chinese immigrant to somewhere else, the system may or may not be more likely to be intact. The naming systems are falling out of practice--maybe it made purges too easy. When families emmigrated out of China, they usually considered their branches cut. [Ref: The Hebrew/Biblical expression for "a branch being cut." It's the same idea.] The topic of "disowning" is an interesting one too when a name is removed.

Another potential Chinese problem may be the generations from the mid-1700's. Many were "revolutionaries," and renamed themselves...thus disturbing the normal flows of the poems.

Europeans used to have such naming systems but they were mostly gone by 1000 AD and any remnant is more monarchial legend than anything else. Many of the original tribal inhabitants in Europe, like in the UK (displaced by the viking people) had naming systems, not poems, but another system. They are mostly written off by modern scholars however, partly because somehow they all start with Noah's son Japheth. Everybody was always the son of xxx, son of xxx, son of xxx, and so on and so on. Chinese was still often this way until recent generations, but to make it easier, everybody's name came off of poems.

In other words, if your family has such a system, your children, grandchildren, etc may already have been named many many generations before they're even conceived.

The idea of naming used to be to impute character and behavior on the people to come. The Bible is again an interesting reference of what naming was about. When Adam is supposed to name the animals on earth, it's not just calling them "A," "B," "C," "D," etc, it's developing each of the animals' characters, behaviors, etc.

The most recent hundred generations or so of people have lost out on this reason for naming individuals. Now it's about uncle Bob's middle name, the pretty-sounding name in such and such movie or inspiration, fads, etc.

[smalltownfart]

According to this wikipedia article, Ong is the Hokkien equivalent of Mandarin Wang, so your Chinese surname should be 王 (it could also be 汪, though).

As for Hai, which your mother says is your Chinese name (if I understand you correctly), it is impossible to figure out what particular character that stands for. Have you asked your mother what, if anything, it is supposed to mean?

It does sound like a Minnan name, but not necessarily Hokkien (Fujian).

王 sounds like a good bet though.

Andy: do you know what dialect your dad's family spoke? Is it Fujian, Teochew (Chaozhou 潮州) ?

Ong could also be Hainanese. Unfortunately, romanization methods, prior to hanyu pinyin (particularly with these dialects) were wildly inconsistent. You could have situations where the last name was originally romanized using one dialect and the first names for later generations romanized in some other dialect like Cantonese.

To get a definite answer, you'd need to begin a painstaking investigation, as per Long Zhiren's suggestion. In the meantime, you can perhaps figure out an approximation based on your dialect, and choose something you like.

If you are Teochew ( like me! ): take a look at this romanization chart:

http://www.teochewdialect.net/chart.php?code=en

You'd see that 'h ai' in Teochew is phonetically similar to Mandarin.

Some examples :

h ai 1 嗨

h ai 2 海

h ai 5 駭

h ai 6 亥

h ai 7 害

I don't know of any romanization chart for Fujian, but it's a similar dialect. Hopefully this chart will be of some use to you.

[avathar]

thx for ur opinion,

something i forget to tell you, i think my family speak hokkien... so if i'm a hokkien, my surname ong equals 汪 ?

i start learning mandarin since last month, so i still incapable of it ^.^

well, half of my family moved into GuangZhou about 15 years ago, and about a years ago they visited us here in indonesia, then i ask the eldest one bout my name, but she think that the one who can give me a name should be the male eldest, although she was from my father side... but she agree that my name should be Ong Hai ... and now in my family, i think the eldest male is my father >.< and he can't speak mandarin, so he can't give me a name.

my big brother has a chinese name, his name is Ong Hai Li, if i'm not mistaken the Li word stands for the ocean... maybe i should go to china and ask my family there bout my name, but it may take another few years for me to go there, since my mandarin still awful, and only some of my family there speak indonesian

is it necesary for me to go to the temple and ask the elderly there bout my name?

[rockadant]

usually in chinese family the middle name is same for one generation. but in some case the middle name of boys and girls are different. so if you are boy, your middle should be hai. if you are girl, i am not sure, but hai is ok in most case. hai means ocean. as Li, usually it may be 力， 利，黎 for boys. they mean power,force; profit,benefit,well-off;dawn respectly. if you are also a boys, i recommend 强（qiang）for you, it means strong, this name is commen in china,moreover the meaning of qiang is close to your brother's name 力Li(if it is right).

[avathar]

thx for ur suggestion, i think Ong Hai Qiang is a good name, but how i should write my name? 汪 Hai 强 is it the correct wy to write it? how should I write the Hai (Ocean)?

[rockadant]

Hai should be 海。 大海 and 海洋 mean ocean.

you could choose 汪海强 or 汪海洋 as your name.

both of them are widly used and very suitable for boys.

[Stefani]

Hi Avathar,

Apa kabar? I am also Chinese Indonesian. Yes, Ong = Wang (in Pinyin). That is my grandmother's last name (so we may be related :-) Good luck with finding your Chinese name.

I have a Chinese name, and now I am looking for a Chinese name for my son, and learning Mandarin. Fortunately my paternal grandfather can speak, read & write Chinese, so we will ask him the next time we see him. My parents can speak, read & write a little, but don't quite dare picking a Chinese name for my son, since in Chinese, a name is much more significant than in English.