This article is less about stories about my crazy Chinese family and more about some other struggles. It’s about names, to be more precise, family names and children names.

 

Family Names

Up till now I got to know several “mixed” couples, most of them where the women is Chinese and the man is European. Of all of those couples who married, the wife kept her Chinese name. Nothing wrong with that as in China it is usual that both partners keep their own family names. In Europe it’s another matter, it’s still not that common that the wife keeps her own name or that the husband changes his family name (Still I know several cases).

My wife didn’t want to change her name as well as she wanted to keep her “Chinese” roots but also wanted to have something more “European”. In the end she decided to have a double family name, with her old one first and then the new one added to the back. Those double family names are not that uncommon either, especially in Germany where you can find nowadays a broad variety of those added names, sometimes resulting in very funny combinations. (For example “Große-Flasche” translates into “Big-Bottle” and many more I better not list here).

When asking our friends about the reasons they kept their own Chinese name they normally said that they don’t want to have any silly European name. But then again, there is still a high discrimination in Europe towards foreigners. For example when applying for jobs many applications are never being opened due to a foreign sounding name. Sad but true.

How to name your child

This is another tricky topic as we are also awaiting our son to be born soon. His name? No idea yet. Okay, this is not entirely true. We have some names already on our mind but we haven’t decided on any specific one yet. We are aiming for a name which can be used both in German language and in English language. Reasons? Well, we plan to move back to Germany later and we want at the same time that the name is time usable for English speakers. (Oh, English speakers have often trouble with my name…). So finding a good sounding name, which can be pronounced in German and in English is very important to us.

We also wish to give our son a second given name. This name will be a Chinese one. As we are more than troubled enough to decide on the first name we have outsourced the task for the Chinese name to mom in law. Just imagine how happy she must be, tinkering each day on possible combinations…

None of our friends in Chinese-European relations have children yet, so we shall be setting a naming example for them. Better be good though 😉

 

 

What are your experiences with family names or about finding a great name for a child?