Names

Jerry Chan's Baby Blog -- Chapter 5

Picking a name for your kid is no easy task – after all, this is the moniker that will follow your child for the rest of her life. Take the States for instance, where Chinese kids with unfortunate English names abound. The Eunices, Arvids, Pearls and Eugenias that I grew up with all have their parents to blame for their awkward handles – and they would have been much better off on the playgrounds of America with just English phoneticizations of their Chinese names. Fortunately my parents had the good sense to take my Chinese name 家伟 “Jia Wei” and phonetically translate into “Jerry” (though here in China people can’t seem to get enough of the Cat and Mouse references). 

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I’ve always thought that my name has had a direct influence on me. I mean, title dictates behavior, and over the years that a lot of my actions would have been different if my parents would have had the guts to call me by their second choice: Barnaby. Yes, that’s right, Barnaby Fowler would have been a much different creature to the one I am today.

Barney would have been a lovable, perhaps slightly dimwitted fellow. Would he have been taller? Thought of as more dependable guy? More attractive to the opposite sex? Who can say, but I am a firm believer in this notion, and I do find myself thinking about it quite a lot.

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With less than a year to go, anticipation for the Olympics seems to be growing by the day – on billboards and television commercials, passing street vendors selling memorabilia or simply passing through a tunnel while riding on the subway.

It seems that some parents couldn't hold their excitement in, as almost 3,500 children have been named "Aoyun" (Chinese for "Olympics") since as early as 2000, when China first made the bid for the upcoming Games. According to a Beijing Daily report cited by the Associated Press, only six of these kids live in Beijing and a majority of them male.

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