The Poetry of Chinese Names

My mother named me Wendy, after the character in Peter Pan . She had come across the animated film on the television one day and had been struck by the character’s creativity, imagination, and kindness. But that was not the only reason she settled on my name. “Wendy” also converted easily into Chinese, where it became two characters: “wen” and “di.” The first character, “wen,” was the same as the first character of my sister’s name, thus emphasizing our sibling relationship and the fact that we were part of the same generation. “Wen” by itself was associated with the image of clouds forming different shapes, shapes my mother used to love gazing at in the sky as a child. When the two characters of my name were put together, the meaning was a reference to a part of a flower. This also matched my sister’s name, which had a similar floral meaning. Names related to flowers are common for daughters, as they are suggestive of beauty and sweetness. Thus, the name my mother gave me had several stories to tell, as Chinese names often do. Chinese parents often choose names that reflect the hopes of the family—whether for their child’s personality or future. My name was chosen for its meaning, and also for its ability to signify my relationship with my sister and the specific generation I would be born into. Furthermore, my name with its bilingual nature reveals something about our family history: my parent’s choice to immigrate to America and embrace their new country. When I was deciding on names of characters for my novel, Their Divine Fires , I wanted to choose names that held significance in terms of meaning and their relationship to generational and familial history. In order to do so, I looked to my family’s names for inspiration. This was a particularly useful strategy as Their Divine Fires is an intergenerational family epic, spanning a century in China and America. For example, the names of my grandparents who were born in the 1930s in China reflects the vast social changes that were happening […]

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