According to my mother, the first part of his name, "Szu" means "Sent" or "Given." The latter half means "Whole" or "Complete." Within the second half is the character for "gold." Altogether, my mother assures me that it is a very well-selected name (you go, birthmother!) I have to agree. I like the idea of Szu-Chuan being a gift from God to make our family complete. And hey, if he winds up a prosperous guy one day, may he have the humility and wisdom to use those resources well.
Craig and I are toying with the idea of re-spelling his Chinese name. Technically, the English spelling is incorrect. The name should be pronounced "Szu-Chien," not "Szu-Chuan." (If you can read the pinyin next to the Chinese characters, you can get a better idea of where the accents fall.)
On one hand, it feels a bit odd to change the spelling of his name. In some strange way, I feel like we'd be tampering with the significant part of his life that is represented by his time in the orphanage. Would it trouble our son one day when he's older? Would he resent us for it?
On the other hand, when you think about it, the English spelling is really quite arbitrary. I doubt the birthmother was responsible for it. Would it bother her if we re-spelled it? I don't think so. I'm guessing she would just want it pronounced correctly.
If we left the name as-is, our son would be consigned to having his middle name mispronounced all his life. Those of us with unconventional names know how much of a nuisance this can be. My mother for one claims that if she could have a re-do, she'd have her last name re-spelled in a very simplistic "Western" way. I don't half blame her; I could probably count on one hand the number of times people unfamiliar with our name have actually pronounced it correctly.
So, "Szu-Chuan?" "Szu-Chien?" "Su-Chien?" "Suchien?"
What do you think?
4 comments:
I would respell it the way that English speakers would pronounce it and not try to beat myself up about it. Remember that how his name is *really* spelled is by using the characters. You're just changing the translation so that people will pronounce the translation correctly. When teaching my child to write his/her name, I could also teach him/her to write it using the traditional Mandarin characters.
I think that since the "real spelling" is the characters, it would be a good idea to change the English spelling. If, however, you decided to keep the spelling, I don't think it would be that big of a deal since it is his middle name.
Hi Judy, I am a new reader of your blog and am enjoying your writing very much! I am also Taiwanese and we had the same problem after receiving our referral (but we ended up not using it because he was not named by the birth mother). However, St Lucy uses the Wade-Giles method of spelling, it is not arbitrary at all! "Szu-Chuan" is the Wade-Giles spelling, but you can also use the Hanyu Pinyin method which would be "Si-Quan" but that isn't any easier to read, I think. And to be even more anal (sorry), the pronunciation of the second character is not "chien". The zhuyin fuhao next to the second character reads "ch", "u", and "an", and together it is pronounced something like "chyuan". A great website is http://www.chinalanguage.com which has recordings of all the words in their dictionary. I just looked and both characters are there. Hope this sorta helps.
I second what Sarah said. :) His "real" Chinese name will be spelled with Chinese characters... I would spell it in English so people will pronounce it correctly. :)
Hadn't thought about these issues when we get our own little guy!!!
Rebecca
Post a Comment