fnames

Foreign Names:

An aside inspired by "the Sheik Marine's" comments below. It happens that I also have a foreign name: a Chinese name, in fact. It was bestowed upon me by a farmer near Hangzhou from whom I often bought vegetables. Native speakers of Chinese have a lot of trouble with my English name, which contains a consonant formation (Br-) that is not found in Chinese. So, for ease of use, I adopted it and used it on all my documents in China.

The name was 大 鬍 鬚, which is written in pinyin Da Huxu and pronounced "DAH Hoo-shoo."

It translates into English as "Big Beard," which was quite right: at the time, distrusting (for very good reason) the quality of the local water, I drank only beer and disavowed shaving. As a consequence, I ended up with a fine forked beard that would have been the pride of a Viking warrior.

The name is interesting in two ways. The first is that, in Chinese, the family name is written first. Thus, on all my official Chinese documents, I'm identified as "Mr. Big."

The other thing that is interesting is that "HuXu" means "beard" only by historic accident. It began as the name of a tribe of barbarians in Western China, who wore beards. Most Han Chinese men -- "Han" being an ethnic grouping that includes better than ninety percent of China's subjects -- can't grow beards until they get quite old. As a result, the beard itself became identified with these wild barbarian tribes of the west.

As a consequence, the real translation of my Chinese name is, "Big Western Barbarian." I couldn't have made a better or more honest choice.