The Poetry of Chinese Names

My mother named me Wendy, after the character in Peter Pan. She had come across the animated film on the television one day and had been struck by the character’s creativity, imagination, and kindness. But that was not the only reason she settled on my name.

“Wendy” also converted easily into Chinese, where it became two characters: “wen” and “di.” The first character, “wen,” was the same as the first character of my sister’s name, thus emphasizing our sibling relationship and the fact that we were part of the same generation. “Wen” by itself was associated with the image of clouds forming different shapes, shapes my mother used to love gazing at in the sky as a child. When the two characters of my name were put together, the meaning was a reference to a part of a flower. This also matched my sister’s name, which had a similar floral meaning. Names related to flowers are common for daughters, as they are suggestive of beauty and sweetness.

Thus, the name my mother gave me had several stories to tell, as Chinese names often do. Chinese parents often choose names that reflect the hopes of the family—whether for their child’s personality or future. My name was chosen for its meaning, and also for its ability to signify my relationship with my sister and the specific generation I would be born into. Furthermore, my name with its bilingual nature reveals something about our family history: my parent’s choice to immigrate to America and embrace their new country.

When I was deciding on names of characters for my novel, Their Divine Fires, I wanted to choose names that held significance in terms of meaning and their relationship to generational and familial history. In order to do so, I looked to my family’s names for inspiration. This was a particularly useful strategy as Their Divine Fires is an intergenerational family epic, spanning a century in China and America.

For example, the names of my grandparents who were born in the 1930s in China reflects the vast social changes that were happening at the time. My grandmother’s name includes the character “ming,” meaning “bright,” a character typically reserved for sons. From what I’ve heard, my grandmother’s mother was a progressive woman for her time who had refused to bind her feet. I like to think that she chose “ming” for her daughter in the hopes she would lead a more liberated life. Over the course of my grandmother’s lifetime, gender expectations for women underwent a sea change. My grandmother ended up pursuing an education and becoming a doctor, leading an independent life that made her mother proud.

My grandfather, on the other hand, was born into a more traditional, wealthy family. One of the characters in his name had the character for “gold” within it. During the Communist Revolution, my grandfather, like many others, decided to change his name to one without such bourgeois decadence. He ended up choosing the character for “spring” as his new name, a name that represented a hopeful optimism for the future of the country.

The names of my parents’ generation—those born in the 60s—were heavily influenced by the nationalistic fervor of the time, the kind of fervor that would eventually drive the Cultural Revolution in China. Names reflected the interests of the nation, rather than the family. For example, names might include the character for “red” (a color associated with revolution), “army,” or even “peasant.”

Sometimes, names made references to Mao Zedong directly, such as the name “Weidong,” meaning “protect Dong” (as in Zedong). During this time period, one’s love for the nation could break even the strongest family bonds. It wasn’t uncommon for children to denounce their parents or students their teachers as antirevolutionary to the Red Guards, who might then humiliate, torture, and even kill these “enemies” of the state. Looking back on the names of my parents’ generation, I am better able to understand the pervasiveness of this fervor.

In Their Divine Fires, I also wanted to pay homage to the concept of a “generation poem.” This was inspired by my father’s family, who has a generation poem they have used for centuries. A generation poem is a poem that a clan agrees to use when naming their descendants. The first word of the poem would be used in the names of the first generation of the family clan. The second word of the poem would be used in the names of the second generation, and so on. When the family reaches the last word of the poem, they will start again at the very beginning.

A generation poem would typically be composed by important progenitors of the family; sometimes, a generation poem might even have been composed by the emperor himself and gifted to a noble family to honor them. In my novel, one of the families is more conservative and traditional, and using a generation poem for that family is a shorthand way to demonstrate those qualities.

When I reflect on the names of my family and each successive generation, I see glimmers of the history we’ve experienced. Our names illuminate our place in the family, and our place in history. Although the many wars, civil wars, and revolutions over the last century in China have destroyed most of my family’s paper records, our names are an inheritance that can never be confiscated or burned. The stories of our names can be passed down, generation to generation, and in that act alone, they hold great power. Choosing the right Chinese name is an act of love. More than that, it is an art.

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Their Divine Fires by Wendy Chen is available now via Algonquin Books.