Liang Hongfu

What's in a name? Quite a lot, actually

By Hong Liang (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-05-30 06:24

Hi folks, I have a new byline. All I have done was to drop one character from my name. It's something I have wanted to do for a long time and this is as good a time as ever.

You see it's that last character "fu" in my name that has been troubling me since I was a kid at school. It's not a bad word. In fact, "fu" is one of the most auspicious words in the Chinese lexicon. It can literally be translated to mean good fortune, happiness or blessing.

Many Chinese families paste paper cuts of the character, usually bright red, on their front doors during Chinese New Year to invite the god of fortune into their homes. Some particularly eager families make a point of pasting the character upside down to signify the arrival of good fortune.

In my clan, all male members of my generation carry that character in their names. There must be more than a hundred of us "fus" living in different cities all over the world. I don't know what the others think about their names. As for me, having the word "fu" in my name is anything but a blessing.

From day one in school, every kid I knew called me "ah fu," which, in Cantonese, is downright derogatory. It is a nickname reserved for dimwits surviving on pure luck.

My middle name "Hong," by the way, means big, which often tends to heighten my embarrassment. A "big fu" in Cantonese means a stupid sucker.

Since then, I had to put up with that nickname with resignation as if I was born with it. I have always suspected that people who knew me only by my nickname actually thought that I was a little, well, dense.

I am not being schizophrenic. We Cantonese have a saying which can be loosely translated to mean that a nickname is worth a thousand words in describing one's true personality. In my case, at least, such generalization certainly does not apply.

As I grew up, I started to learn to laugh off attempts by those particularly vicious schoolmates to make fun of my name. Those were, after all, crude but, nevertheless, harmless boys' jokes. Quite a few of them got stuck with nicknames with even more embarrassing connotations than mine.

My name trouble took on an entirely new dimension when I started to date. Girls can be merciless with boys, especially those with funny nicknames. Adopting an English name seemed the right thing to do. It was fashionable too.

After a great deal of research and thought, I announced to my friends that from then on, I was to be called James, in honour of the 18th Century English explorer Captain James Cook, one of my boyhood heroes. My friends were not impressed. They kept calling me by my nickname.

My hang-ups with my nickname disappeared when I went to work for an English-language daily newspaper in Hong Kong. Most of my colleagues there were either foreigners or thoroughly Westernized Hong Kong Chinese. They knew me only by my anglicized name.

Since then, I have felt that I was free from the nuisance associated with my name. But I have never quite given up the idea of giving my name some kind of a facelift. I haven't done it simply because I couldn't think of something that I liked.

Many Chinese Americans are fond of dropping one word from their three-word names. I, of course, know exactly which word to drop from mine. But my middle name in Cantonese sounds as flat as stale soda. So, I just let the idea rest.

Although I have been using my pinyin byline for many months, it never occurred to me that the combination of my middle name and family name could jive so well. Then I received an e-mail from a reader commenting on one of my recent columns. She didn't give any advice on a change of name. But she dropped the "fu" from my name, most probably by mistake. I read it out loud and loved the way it sounds.

From now on, please call me Hong Liang.

Email: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/30/2006 page4)