Names are funny things. You can summon the devil with
them, marry with them and get sent to war because you
own one. Slaves in many a country, including
old Chosun, were not allowed to inherit one. As a prisoner
or bank customer you might be dehumanized by a mere number.
We have nick-names and pen-names and nom-de-guerre, not
to mention intimate bedroom names and lately, avatar names
for Net chat flights of fancy. In short, a name is our
social mask, sometimes chosen at whim, sometimes imposed
on pain of death.
From that first stare of infant school disbelief my
own name has had the caste of a trickster's magic cloak.
No one called Thorold Pyrke May could possibly belong
down in the mosh pit with the Johns and and Marys and
Ians. Teachers would circle around it like a possibly
contagious virus. What god-forsaken failed state could
the owner of such a moniker hail from, and how had he
wound up in the bacon-and-eggs-and-steamed-pudding-world
of Australia (97% Anglo-Irish in 1945, when I was born)
? As a teenager, armed by a thousand slights, I would
argue fiercely that Thorold (old English, 'the might of
Thor') had come to England with the Viking invasions 1500
years ago ... But it was all too complicated. Thorold
was a non-starter, didn't stack up for friendly familiarity
along with Tom, Dick and Harry. But they couldn't quite
squash the owner either; it didn't belong with all those
greasy Southern European labels like Alfonso and Dimitrius
which had begun to invade the pure Anglo heartlands of
Sydney town. No, there was something elvish, something
of a wizard flavour about Thorold that seemed faintly
dangerous. Best to leave its owner alone .... Later,
much later, lobbing a job as a traveling salesman on the
mean city pavements, the price of exotica became too high.
"Hi", I'd grovel, "I'm Tony from Business
Equipment...". Escaping slick Tony was to breath
oxygen again, to claw out of the fetid swamps of commerce
into the high lands of intellectual splendour. Well, not
too splendid. 'Thor' edged in as a compromise.
But even 'Thor', disguised in flattened monotone of
Australian street talk, was a cultural missile way beyond
the calibration of your average boozy bloke. Resignedly,
I'd offer the handle : "G'day, I'm Thor",
then wait for the ricochet. It was pretty predictable.
"G'day Phil", they'd shoot back. "Yeah
mate..". It was no good correcting them. More than
once some bozo has turned aggressive and argued heatedly
that I'd said "Phil". There was a puzzle here.
Maybe it's why I became a linguist. Phonologically, /th/
is an affricate, /f/ ('ph') is a frictative, so they are
pretty close. If you think about it, not many common English
given names start with these sounds. When the average
person hears something like /f/ or /th/ their mental computer
does a rapid search amongst the small store of candidate
words, and selects what it thinks is most likely. Then
that becomes a biblical certainty in the individual's
memory. Apparently their critical faculty doesn't
extend to the entirely unrelated final sounds in Thor
and Phil (/or/, /il/).
So what's the lesson from all this whacky name
stuff? My rocky history perhaps taught me sooner than
most folk that names get you into mind-game territory.
They are more potent social symbols than blow-dried hair-dos
and pointy shoes or nose rings. With name X you are destined
to be an insider or outsider, glamorous, opaque or ordinary.
It is hardly surprising then that a study of the names
in a community, and their lineage, is like picking through
the archeological layers of Africa's Olduvai Gorge, piecing
together a broken tooth here, a bit of jawbone there,
until you have an outline of the whole hairless ape in
its ancient glory ...
In 1998 my transition from the barbecue backyards of
suburban Australia to the hazy concrete canyons of a central
Chinese city amounted to junking all the accumulated reminder
notes in the margins of my mental encyclopaedia. Half
a century of survival tips down the drain. No longer could
I wrap, tape and stamp a man for instant mental reference,
just by eyeing the droop of his shoulders and the vowels
curled on his tongue. And I too was a walking enigma,
a ghost under the feet of Wuhan's seven million busy bodies.
To them, John, Jill and Thorold Pyrke May were equally
strange, unpronounceable, and instantly forgotten. Would
it be a smart move, I wondered, to rewrap my big nose
with a friendly Chinese name ?
Putonghua, standard Chinese, is the most unornamented
of languages, at least to an outsider. Where English hedges
with 'woulds' and 'coulds' , Chinese brutally dumps
two possibilities on the same chopping block and leaves
it to you to draw your conclusions. Qu bu qu ? -- go
not go ? it demands, shi bu shi ? -- is it
isn't it ? .. How then was it going to handle the
cultural minefield of human names? Some of the anecdotal
comments I heard didn't sound promising. Many a family,
it seemed, had the poetic imagination of a pickle factory
commisar. Translated, one would meet Brother One, Brother
Three, Sister Two. Then there were those miserable women
stuck for life with the appelation 'Miss Waiting-for-little-brother',
and perhaps thanking their lucky stars that the pregnancy
ultrasound test had not fingered them in time for an abortion.
But what the Chinese language loses in syntactic elaboration,
it more than compensates for in the baroque associations
of its pictorial script. This script is the coded poetry
of the Chinese soul, learned in blood and sweat over years
of hard labour, but once mastered is a key to chains of
association, prompted with a few deft strokes, but emotionally
stretching into the misty distance. Each hanzi
(character) is like the musical note of an ancient and
complex instrument, rich in timbre and resonating with
its companions to harmonies that, every Chinese man and
woman is certain, are forever closed to the ears of foreign
barbarians. And so, of course, it goes with Chinese names.
The magic is not in the naked puffs of sound, but in the
brush strokes from whence they arise. Communists or no
communists, the choosing of a name character can be a
matter for careful consultation with monks, scholars and
fortune tellers. The number of strokes is important, for
there are lucky numbers and unlucky numbers. And the character
expected of the child, from many portents of astrology
and divination, can also bear upon the choice. So for
every pickle factory commisar there is also another mother
whispering the safe choice of a lucky name, or in stirring
times a father naming his son for the glory of revolution.
Not so boring after all.
Historical China, like many traditional cultures, was
a layered society where the importance of names and obligations
attaching to them multiplied as you progressed up the
social ladder. A gentleman, graduated from the imperial
examinations, stood at the apex of this hierarchy, and
the names by which he was referred to or addressed could
reflect this complexity. Upon achieving maturity it was
often customary to adopt a new name. Again, as in other
cultures, chamelions like major political figures often
became known by different names to different constituencies.
For example, Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern
China in 1911, had several names and took on a variety
of pseudonyms for revolutionary activity. At missionary
school in Hawaii he was Dai Juog. The missionaries
christened him Rih Xin (Yat-sun in Cantonese),
meaning 'new day', then later changed it to I-Xien
(Yat-sen in Cantonese). Decoded through the magic
of hanzi characters this carries flavours of 'free',
'extraordinary' and 'immortal spirit'. A name like that
seems a bit overdramatized to buy your daily bowl of rice
with, and a world away from 'Miss Waiting-for-little-brother',
but that is all part of the tapestry of contradictions
which make up China.
How then would the bold pretensions of the Viking thunder
god, Thor, translate to a Chinese pantheon? At 168cm tall
I've always been a kind of parody of my celestial namesake.
Immortal Thor was forbidden to cross the Rainbow Bridge
from Earth to Asgaard (home of the gods) for fear that
his weight would break it asunder. No matter, a certain
Chinese lady who had convinced herself that she wanted
to be Mrs May (an extraordinary idea, gracefully declined)
put much time and thought into a my proper Chinese identity.
After consulting a judge and various luminaries she presented
me with Mei
Tian Xiao. Luckily, in Chinese 'May' is close enough
to 'plum blossom', a well regarded flower because it is
hardy enough to bloom in winter. Tian is 'sky'
and the fairly rare hanzi for Xiao means
' a roar, a shout', so Thor is suitably acknowledged.
Was all this sound and colour a formula for sly mirth,
I wondered ? It seems not. Others, entire strangers, have
spontaneously assured me that it is indeed a beautiful
name. The lady admirer gifted me a carved ox horn seal
(yin zhang) with my name engraved in ancient Zhuan
characters, quite illegible to any modern Chinese, but
the essence of a seal is its uniqueness after all. Ah,
so much glory for a paper dragon who, to be drearily honest,
has neither destroyed old worlds nor built new ones in
this life, and seems somewhat unlikely to ...
My transition to South Korea posed the problem of identity
all over again, though here the element of foreign name
confusion was much less pressing. In Wuhan I was one from
a hundred or so big noses in a city of seven million.
Korea though has been force-fed through an American
military machine and still hosts 38,000 GIs. For a generation
American English has seemed like the path to riches, and
people spend absurd sums of money trying to acquire it.
Yet scratch the surface and the limitations of hamburger
culture quickly become evident. Firstly, Korean is a mind-bendingly
different language in its organization from English; (tones
apart, Chinese by comparison is child's play). Even Koreans
who have clawed and contorted their mental machinery enough
to produce some imitation of fluent English are apt to
admit that it gives them a headache. Sizable numbers of
individuals cling to a treacherous landscape of sub-English
in a mixture of desperation and hatred, a kind of national
psychosis. Dilittante Anglo adventurers like me, timidly
reaching towards Korean, face similar barriers of course.
Given this gulf, it seemed to me that the modest gesture
of hosting a Korean name couldn't do any harm.
Not long after my Korean arrival I asked an administrative
functionary, who happened to speak some English, his views
on a suitable Korean name. The immediate idea was to put
something on my business card. Ever polite, he came up
with Mae
Cheon-so. I had told him about the etymology of Thor,
but I doubt that it registered, and it later turned out
that I'd collected a pretty meaningless bunch of syllables.
It didn't matter too much. Literal meanings, they told
me, weren't important with Korean names as long as they
had three syllables. (See Pomona
Pronunciation Guide to Korean names).
The classroom English names acquired by Koreans (and Chinese)
were after all mostly quite random and devoid of personal
attachment; (also changed at whim). Gradually I understood
that these unsentimental English tags were often a fair
reflection of disinterest in Anglo culture generally.
The English language in Korea is, at this stage of its
history, a spanner but not a family heirloom. Of course
they assumed that my "Korean name" could be
equally accidental if I insisted on such a thing anyway.
As it happened, I found a real use for the name faster
than expected. My bank demanded a Korean name when I opened
an internet account. It was one of the few banks with
an English language service, but the concessions only
went so far. It was absolutely impossible, their computer
programs analyst e-mailed me, to enter [ridiculous] foreign
names onto their data base. Why, extending the database
field forms beyond three syllables would take up huge
[sic] amounts of hard disk space; (hmm I wonder how, say,
the Sri Lankans with names in double digit syllables ever
manage to run a banking service ....).
Silly names for foreign games are one thing. Korean
names for Koreans though are a deadly serious business
with a torturous history. That information wasn't volunteered
by Koreans themselves; (at least the folk I meet are polite
and cordial, but rarely forthcoming beyond small talk).
However, it is almost impossible to probe Korean history
without stumbling upon the role that personal names have
played as cultural symbols. To start with the present,
Koreans are pretty well unable to change their
formal names by any legal process; (very different from
Australia where it is a simple administrative act). As
with laws of marriage and inheritance (much resented by
progressive women), name laws are rooted in Korean history.
In Chosun Korea, where social classes were set by law,
your name very firmly set your place in society. As
yangban (aristocracy) you were generally exempt from
taxes and military service. As a slave you had few rights;
as a despised merchant, a craftsman or a farmer your name
locked you in for all kinds of obligations. In spite of
its small geographical size, Korea was also an area of
fierce regional clan rivalries (this still splits national
politics and even affects marriage choices). Clans are
structured about names. However, the neo-Confucian extremism
of Chosun Korea bred much hypocrisy (as ideology everywhere
tends to do). By the final years of the Yi Chosun dynasty
vast swathes of the population had changes their family
names to those of a few powerful yangban families.
This was done by bribery, forgery, and stealth, but finally
made a mockery of the whole caste system.
Perhaps 60% of modern Korean words have a Chinese origin.
Until very recently the Korean writing system, hangeul,
itself was despised (although any Korean will now parrot
it's claimed brilliance and the foresight of King Sejong
who commissioned it in the 13th Century). Its seems to
have been almost a foundation belief by the Chosun glitterati
that all things Chinese were superior and all things native
Korean were rustic. This certainly went for names, and
Chinese names were widely adopted along with all the mystique
and superstition that went with writing their character
forms. Thus most current Korean personal names have a
Chinese source, and a hanja (ideogram) form loaded
with associations like their mainland Chinese equivalents.
Unlike English, Chinese is an hierloom but not often a
real tool for ordinary Koreans. It must be said that,
scholars apart, these ordinary Koreans know little of
the etymology of their general vocabulary, or of their
names.
Sometimes the Korean name game has strange outcomes.
An American Korean, James
Choi, on a Harvard web page records that "..You
see, every Korean clan has a poem by which the children
in each generation are named. According to the poem, I
was supposed to have the character hyun in my name.
But my grandmother went to a fortuneteller to get my name
instead. Thus, the first character of my name, jin,
has 19 strokes in Chinese, and the second character, woo,
has 6 strokes, corresponding to my birth year of 1976
for good luck. This makes for interesting story-telling,
but it also completely mangled the meaning of my name.
Jin means "to press down," while woo
is an exceedingly rare character which means something
like "a small pond." Such is the price of superstition."
From 1910 until 1945 Korea became a Japanese colony.
The avowed aim of the Japanese overlords was to destroy
or discredit every vestige of Korean culture. It was a
perverse obsession with deep psychological roots, for
much of Japan's material culture, not to mention its royal
lineage, had a Korean origin. Japanese imperial mythology
required a repudiation and denial of these links (a denial
maintained by most Japanese to this day). The Korean language
itself was forbidden as a medium for education, business
or administration. As an ultimate act of cultural genocide,
every Korean was required to take a Japanese name. In
World War II many Koreans found themselves trapped in
the Japanese military machine, usually at the very lowest
level, and the Yasukuni war shrine has duly inscribed
the Japanese names of 21,181 Koreans together with 20,000
Chinese and 2.46 million Japanese - a matter of some contention
(July 2001 Korea
Times editorial ). Needless to say, liberation from
the Japanese yoke in 1945 led to a fierce popular reaction,
with all things Japanese stigmatized. The Japanese names
of Koreans were a quick casualty. Yet for one group of
Koreans, even these hated Japanese names became an hierloom.
After World War II a significant number of Koreans
remained in Japan for various reasons. They were stripped
of all civic rights and suffered great discrimination,
usually mitigated by hiding their Korean origins whenever
possible. Today these folk comprise 1% of Japan's population.
Almost 80% of such Korean people use only Japanese names
(referred to as "passing names"), 15% of them
use both Korean and Japanese names, and only 5% use their
real Korean names (see Felix
Ramli and Miha Chon 1999 ). It has been argued that
many younger people affected in this way are far more
familiar with their Japanese identity than their Korean
inheritance (a process familiar to cross-generation immigrants
the world over).
It seemed then that by taking on a Korean name I was
trading into a very messy business. Should I remain satisfied
with Mae
Chon-seo ? My employer, the sometime Sungsim College
of Foreign Languages has just been swallowed by another
institution, Youngsan University. Hence a new name card
is in order, and perhaps a new name. This time I have
sought the views of a fair cross section of university
staff and students. Their responses have been diverse.
One professor suggested Haneul
U-lim, Haneul meaning 'sky' and U-lim
a 'roar, a peal'. Mae would have to be dropped,
since the full quota of three syllables is used up. Well,
it meets the 'Thor' connection, but class after class
of students gave it an almost universal thumbs down. They
immediately picked up on the hanja (Chinese character)
representation though, and read it as Cheon-seong,
which was apparently quite acceptable. Cheon is
the word normally used for 'sky' or 'the heavens'. What
was going on? Another Korean language professor gave me
the clue. Cheon-seong,
she complained, had a Chinese taste about it, whereas
Haneul
U-lim was indigenous Korean. Yet it was the Chinese
version, she reluctantly conceded, which was socially
acceptable, especially since Seong was a common
name when cast in a different hanja meaning 'successful'.
My students, by and large, have no idea of etymology,
Korean or Chinese, and are desperately ignorant of history.
Clearly, the very names through which they are known have
been successfully colonized by a foreign Chinese culture,
yet they would fight the death to defend this 'Korean'
identity. Just as common Japanese can remain impervious
to suggestions of Korean influence behind a wall of ignorance,
so ordinary Koreans have assumed almost unknowing ownership
of a Chinese heritage. However that may be, with some
lingering worries about the vainglory, I've more or less
adopted Mae
Chon-seong.
Some of my informants had more imaginative ideas. One
suggested Cheon-u
, 'Sky Rain' which seems kind of nice, and less strident
than 'Sky Boom', but strangers found it puzzling. Electronic
gaming and the plague of avatars showed their hand with
an offer of
Mileu Bio, or 'Dragon Blue-wind' . Another, much
more conservative lady teacher took several days to come
up with a careful table of options which would have me
adopt the surname of Mr Australia, a dashing ideogram,
reduced to the cryptic syllable Ho in hangeul.
To this I was offered a menu of additions, all elaborate
hanja but reducing to single syllables in hangeul
(although each also had a fully expressed form)
: Min (gentle character, good tempered, mild);
Min (autumn sky); Bin (brilliant, bright, shining,
outstanding scholar), Jeong (even tempered). It
was all rather charming, and this lady was clearly practiced
in the art of finding names for babies. My gallery
of student critics however gave these inventions short
shrift, the nuanced Confucian origins entirely beyond
their grasp.
Talking of the clueless, how did I come to be branded
with Thorold Pyrke May in the first place? The early married
life of my parents remains mostly in the realm of mystery
to me, including the dynamics of this eccentric choice
(though I don't resent it). 'Pyrke' is even stranger than
'Thorold' as a given name, but it was at least an heirloom.
My father carried it as an overdone addition in 'William
Henry Pyrke May', apparently in the forlorn hope of scoring
some inheritance from rich English relatives with the
surname of Pyrke. 'Thorold' though was was an interloper
from a wartime friendship. Squadron
Leader Ray Thorold-Smith, DFC, was at one stage
my father's commanding officer in World War II. His Spitfire
fighter plane was shot down in action on 15 March 1943,
dogfighting Japanese Zeroes near Darwin, Australia. But
before that tragedy, he'd very kindly put his cigarette
lighter under dad's RAAF enlistment papers. My father,
a knockabout young rogue, was tired of the air force and
decided to join a maritime unit under a false name, so
Thorold-Smith offered him the exit. Name games again.
Somehow it seems comforting that a name which has marked
me out for 57 years should have come from a very brave
man who mischievously gave another fellow permission to
simply disappear.
"About Names"
copyrighted to Thor May 2003; all rights reserved
We want to hear what you think of our
advertisers. For Information about our advertising policies and rates
or to offer feedback about one of our sponsors, please visit our Sponsorship
Page