tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you donāt know Chinese
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Choosing a Chinese name, if you donāt know a Chinese language, is difficult, but hereās a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you doĀ know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax.Ā Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time?Ā Itās true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you thinkĀ āGod, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named youā, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, itās not the end of the world! Your characterās parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!
However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldnāt care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day.Ā That shit is awful and tbh itās as inaccurate and racist as sayingĀ āching chongā to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).
So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your characterās surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesnāt have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of Chinaās population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdlyĀ common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if youāre making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if youāre writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; thatās very very common.
If you donātĀ have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If youāre notĀ going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. Youāll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin.Ā It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the nameās pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.) Ā A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.
So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, donātĀ give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didnāt existĀ when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! thatās up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.
If youāre working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if youāre working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if youāre writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didnāt exist back then. Justā¦ just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.
(Hereās anĀ āexceptionsā paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I donāt know why youāre here. Get. Scoot!)
One last point about names that use the Ć¼ with the umlaut over it. The umlaut Ć¼ is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the Ć¼ appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lĆ¼, nu/nĆ¼, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such asĀ āLu Buā in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written LĆ¼ Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesnāt make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your characterās surname is pronouncedĀ āloo as in loo rollā but SURPRISE MOFO itās actually lĆ¼! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and Ć¼ when typing but donāt have easy access to a keyboard method of making the Ć¼, the typical shorthand is the letter v.Ā
Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?
Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, donāt cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.
Here are some premises weāre going to be operating on, and Iām not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:
Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and Iāll give one specific example of this later on.)
As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.
So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. Youāll notice that educationĀ is a big one. If you canāt decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that canāt go wrong.
Unlike in English speaking cultures (and Iām going to limit myself to English because weāre writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of ānamesā in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you needĀ this tutorial, you donāt know enough to try it.)Ā Congratulations, it is now a name!!
But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names donāt. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesnāt mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.
So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!
Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education youāre valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words aboutĀ these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan YuāsĀ āyuā (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protectionā¦
So when youāre choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that soundsĀ ālike a nameā; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, hereās my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: ēļ¼ęļ¼é. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so youāre still doing better than they are. High five!
Youāre going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as youāve used for the surname. In the interests of time, Iām going to focus on pinyin only.
First letās take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that Iāve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then weāll go over some resources and also some pitfalls.Ā Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!
Letās start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally Iāll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and RainĀ and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that workā¦ and its prequelsā¦ and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Donāt worry, Iāll wait.
(Iām just kidding you donāt need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)
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