Feilan is pinyin for two characters in my Chinese name - my full name is Mai Fei Lan:
麦菲兰。 Chinese names are traditionally three characters. The first is your family name and the other two are your given names. I have since learned that the idea of two given names was temporarily abandoned during the cultural revolution. A Chinese person with a two character name was very likely born during that time when it was declared counter revolutionary to be so bourgeois-self indulgent as to carry two given names ... Whether passionate party members were in the habit of discarding one of their names, I don't know, but it's an interesting question. Anyway --
You could say, it is also my 'username' IRL when I speak and write in Chinese. The wisdom is that you are developing a new identity, a distinctly new expression of yourself in a new language, influenced by that language, so you take a new name that reflects that intention ...
If I may digress somewhat, and only because Chinese students with English names had so much influence on my decisions leading to my Chinese name: these days and for some time now, a huge proportion of International students in English speaking countries are coming from China and they bring English names with them.
Even when given in pinyin, their Chinese names suffer horrendous mutilation on the tongues of their ESL teachers for obvious reasons, but that's not why they choose English names. They do it for the same reason I took a Chinese name. Some choose their own, or else a teacher in their public school past gave them one. Some, after a few weeks or months abroad, get a sense of some western associations with a name they chose in China, like Cherry, and spend some agonizing weeks desperate to discard it and find a new one.
The names they choose for themselves run a wild and captivating spectrum, from perfectly ordinary English names to things like
'Sponge' - Sponge is a girl who just loves the sound of the word
'sponge'. She knows what it means and of course that lends it yet another layer of association for her - as in 'language sponge'! Other students I've met have invented an English name by transliterating their Chinese name into an English form and sound. The spellings they come up with are interesting. This strategy follows the transliteration/transposing used for importing any foreign word or name for use in Chinese. A couple of examples are
"xing bo ke" = 'starbucks', or
"mai dang lao" = 'Macdonald's' ...
I had long been considering the advice to take up a second language in order to improve oneself as a language teacher, and not because you plan to use that language in the classroom, although you could if your students all share that language. The primary idea is that you will personally experience the enormity of the challenge your students have taken on. It is, along with other things, an intensely emotional struggle that requires you to set aside the you that communicates with others in your first laguage. On what often feels like a very lonely road, you start all over again. I couldn't decide which language until I experienced Chinese in China and something clicked inside me. I think, if I was a duckling, we might call that 'imprinting' ... anyway, I was incredibly blessed to find myself with quite a few very solid human connections on that trip, which can only be classified as family at this point.
Anywhere you go in China where wai guo ren (foreigners) are apt to be found wandering about in tourist mode, you will find a man sitting at a folding table on a sidewalk who will give you your Chinese name and carve the characters into a name stamp for about 10 yuan ... (buck-fifty) ... David = Da wei ... Susan = Su shan ... Helen = Hai lun ... you get the idea. I'm not keen on the sound of my transliterated name which is to say I couldn't identify with it as my name. Also, I wanted my fledgling identity as a Chinese speaker grounded more deeply in the language - not imported. When I told this story to a class of Internationals from China about a year later, starting with the Chinese version of my English name, and they laughed like hell for at least a minute before being able to explain what was so funny, I realized I'd made a very good decision. Apparently, one possible interpretation is the image of a mad person running around without clothes on. Dodged a bullet there, I think you'll agree.
I pestered my gege (elder brother) for a name and he said, "No, that's too serious a job for me. We'll talk to jiejie (elder sister) ..." She also deferred but said she would hand the business over to her sister, a lovely woman who teaches Chinese literary history at a University and is also a student of feng shui. She was given my birth date and time, where I was born, the meaning of my names in English and I don't know what else to work with, but three weeks later I was given my name. A year later, I was a guest in her home. After dinner, she pulled out the book she uses for this purpose and went about explaining how she came up with it. I was in way over my head language-wise so gege translated the gist...
麦 (mai) -- a word for barley or wheat, also a common surname.
菲 (fei) -- rich and luxurious, of flowers and grass
兰 (lan) -- an orchid ...
... feng shui further attributes aspects of human character to these written characters ... enthusiasm and modesty ... there was also some difficulty owing to the fact that one of these (I think the first one) is, as a given name, considered auspicious for a male but possibly an indication of certain difficulties for a female ... ying/yang stuff. One day, I'm sure - I'll be able to speak with her about it directly. In the meantime ... Feilan should do some studying.
Many people will sleep for a hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back. ~ Louis David Riel
by Gnomad » Mon May 16, 2011 3:53 pm 
<--- That's a wizard smoking a pipe, btw.
