What's in a Name?

One of the first things we did after receiving Alex's referral was to try to find out the meaning of his Chinese name. There are several websites where you can type in the pinyin, and it will show a list of Chinese characters that are spelled out with the same pinyin. Then all you have to do is match the Chinese character to the one on the official document, and you can find the meaning. But we tried each of his names (Lee Yueh Hsiang) at several sites with no luck. No characters came up for any of the names. The closest thing we found was some sort of business with the name YuehHsiang. We knew that couldn't be right.

Lucky for us, we have a friend from mainland China. We sent him a copy of the Chinese characters, and this is what he sent back as the name:

Li yue-xiang; "Li" is the family name meaning "plum", "yue" means
"mountain", and "xiang" means "detail" or "kind / mildness".

We immediately picked up on the different spelling. Sure enough, when we went back to the translation websites and used the spelling from our friend, we had no trouble getting the characters to be displayed.

That got our curiosity up, so we did a little research, and found there are several different forms of Chinese pinyin. This really isn't surprising, because to native speakers of Mandarin, it's the character that really matters. The pinyin is just a device to help people unfamiliar with the characters know how to pronounce them. The interesting thing is that in Taiwan, there are 3 different pinyins used--one declared to be the official version in 2002, one that is preferred by people who favor reunification with China, and the traditional version that everyone grew up with (this was the pinyin on our documents).

So our son's name means "Plum, kind mountain" Cool. Lee is the surname for his birth family. Yueh is a portion of the name given to all the boys born in 2007 who were placed at St. Lucy's Center. Hsiang is the unique portion of his name, chosen just for him.

And the name Alex? Well, we had no small amount of difficulty choosing that name. It was actually the first name that we all liked, and I even called our son Alex for the first 2 weeks after receiving the referral, but for whatever reason, we just couldn't commit. For the next few months, we went through the name book dozens of times, made list after list and rated each others'choices. And after all that, we came back to our original favorite around the middle of February. Alex comes from Alexander the Great, and it means "the great defender." You know, with 3 older sisters, it probably will be fortunate if he learns to defend himself!