‘What’s in a name?” or Becoming Maria Jose

“What’s in a name?” asked the bard, dismissively. He obviously hadn’t tried ordering a Frappuccino at Starbucks. Over the years my name has undergone some impressive orthographic contortions at the hands of baristas in different parts of the world. I’ve been mislabeled Pullover, Pavali, Pavalari, Payawi, Pavalova and Palava, to name but a few of these. Exhausted by the alarmed reaction my rather ordinary (in India) name evokes in coffee shop attendants abroad, I have taken to naming myself Polly in English speaking countries, Parabi in Japan and “Maria Jose” in Spain. I get my coffee a lot quicker as a result.

Daniel Fish/Thrillist

China was the one country where I didn’t face this particular problem, because from the outset I had a Chinese name, Ai Bei. My students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, to whom I taught English back in 2002-2003, chose the name for me.

I remember being flummoxed on my first day as their teacher on encountering a room of  Chinese students standing up and introducing themselves as Byron and Montgomery. Some identified themselves as Ice and Echo, while one dimple-cheeked girl announced herself to be “Anapple,” as in “an apple”.  One of my favourite name choices was “Better,” a delicate blend, I thought, of arrogance and humility.

In China it was standard practice for youngsters to take on western names when they first began to study English. Family names were kept unaltered and only given names were anglicised so that you had Montgomery Hou, Byron Li and so on. Some chose literal translations of their Chinese names with the result that girls called Elegant Wang and Promise Xu were common. Others had more practical reasons for their choice. “My name is Fat. I chose this name because I am fat,” announced one portly youth. His classmates nodded slowly in agreement at this statement of fact.

To begin I was uncomfortable with these anglicized names. It seemed demeaning for someone with a beautiful Chinese name to have to call themselves ‘Jack’ or ‘Emma’ simply to make it more convenient for English speakers to remember. (This was before I had resigned myself to being Maria Jose at Madrid Starbucks).

But, I soon realized that the changing of names was a two-way street in China and all foreigners had perforce to adopt Chinese monikers as well. The Chinese language lacked an alphabet and its thousands of characters had only 420 different corresponding sounds. As a result, the majority of Chinese words were homonyms distinguishable in meaning only through differences in tone and in the corresponding written characters. The language was consequently unable to absorb foreign words that had sounds lacking a matching Chinese character. 

It was for example impossible to write Elizabeth in Chinese characters because there was no character that corresponded to that sound. Foreign proper nouns needed to be rechristened in Chinese. America was “Mei Guo”, McDonalds “Mai Dang Lao”, Starbucks, “Xin Ba Ke” and Pallavi Aiyar, became “Ai Bei”. Ai because that was the first syllable of my family name Aiyar, and bei meant flower bud, close enough to the “new leaves/plant shoot” meaning of Pallavi.

Naming conventions are always fascinating and far more diverse than the westernized ‘given name-middle name-surname’ sequence. Surnames only became common in India relatively recently, during the colonial era and in much of south India they remain an alien practice. Traditionally, south Indians had long monikers comprising the name of their ancestral village, their father’s given name, their own given name and their caste.

Some families (like mine) eventually adopted a surname in keeping with western norms to make themselves more legible to the outside world. Others attempted the same outcome by using acronyms for their lengthy appellations. A childhood friend’s father was a well-known diplomat, an ambassador at different times to France, Germany and Algeria, and went by T.C.A Rangachari. The T.C.A was in lieu of Tirumalai Kundavakam Anandam Pillai. I would have loved to see him order an espresso at a Starbucks.

In China, it was the number rather than the length of names that proved problematic. Over 85 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people share only 100 family names so that there are over 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis. To put these numbers in perspective were all the Wangs in China to form an independent nation they would become the world’s 12th most populous country.

The word for the “common man” in Chinese is, in fact, “laobaixing” which literally translates as the “old 100 names” and refers to the 100 names that make up the overwhelming majority of Han Chinese family names. Until a few decades ago school children across China were taught to reel off the list of 100 surnames by rote. “Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li, Zhou, Wu, Zheng, Wang” the list begins, which when said aloud has a nursery rhyme-like lilt.

The predicament of this nomenclatural-paucity is moreover aggravated by the tendency of Chinese parents to follow naming fashions so that large numbers of children in a particular generation end up with not only the same family names but also identical personal names.  Cohorts of children in the 1960s and 70s, for example, were called Guo Qin (Naional Day), Wei Hong (Protect Communism) and Wen Ge (Cultural Revolution) as parents attempted to demonstrate their patriotic credentials. These days names like Mei (beautiful) or Yin (elegant), reflective of the contemporary desires Chinese parents have for their children, have gained currency.

I had a bank clerk friend in China called Ms Song who told me she had two Wang Qiangs as colleagues. The two were differentiated in the standard Chinese way by adding the prefix lao meaning older, or xiao meaning younger before their names. But this method didn’t always work “Once we heard that Wang Qiang was transferring to our department and we were all happy. But later we discovered it was the other Wang Qiang who was being transferred and we were less happy, because Wang Qiang-2 had bad body odour,” Song had recounted.

For the uninitiated Chinese names can be the subject of silly puns in the vein of “Hu said what and Wen?” inspired by the former President-Prime Minister duo of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. But for one news anchor in India an unintended error ended in her losing her job when she read out visiting President Xi Jinping’s name as “Eleven Jinping,” displaying an impressive grasp of Roman numerals, but a less firm grip on current affairs.

Spain suffers from a similar problem to China when it comes to a lack of diversity in names, but here it's the given or “Christian” names that could do with some variation, given the custom of naming first-born children after their parents. My husband, for example, was Julio, named after his father, Julio, who was named after his father, Julio. When our first child, a boy, was about to be born and we were discussing potential names my father-in-law imaginatively suggested we choose Julio. We demurred even at the risk of provoking a long line of Julios into turning in their graves in disapproval.

A friend recently told me that he reckoned 65 percent of Spanish women and 25 percent of men had some form of “Maria” in their name. I’m not sure how scientific an estimate this is, but I do know my mother-in-law is called Maria, and being Maria Jose in Starbucks works a treat.

Another name-related idiosyncrasy in Spain is continually meeting people who introduce themselves as Jesus. These aren’t sufferers of a God-complex, just bearers of a popular Spanish name. (There are also women called Inmaculada Concepcion or Immaculate Conception – you have to love it!)

One Spanish naming tradition I thoroughly approve of is that children take the surnames of both their fathers and mothers. The maternal name only lasts a generation. So for example my husband’s surname is Arias-Camison Altieri, the ‘Altieri” being his mother’s family name (or to be precise her father’s surname), but our children have the family name Arias-Camison Aiyar. It isn’t a perfect solution to gender balance in naming, but better than many common patrilineal surname norms.

It does mean Spaniards generally need more space to fill out their appellations on official forms. But it could be worse. They could be south Indian. I found this answer to “What’s the longest Indian name?” on Quora. One “Aniruth Narayana” put himself up for consideration. He wrote:

“It was 1994 and I was the male child born to our family after several girl-births. And almost all the important relatives of my family started pouring their blessings on me by contributing their part in naming me…My father named me "Kalanadhabhatta Satya Siva Srikrishnaanjaneya Phani Surya Srinivasa Aniruddha Narayana Sastry"…My name was registered in the local municipality as "K. S. S. S. K. A. P. S. S. Aniruddha Narayana Sastry." Take that Starbucks!

Hasta la proxima semana,

Xo

PS: Don’t forget to share this piece with your friends, if you enjoyed it, and leave me your favourite name-related anecdotes in the comments section. I’m especially interested in your take on changing your name in a foreign country to make it easier for the “natives” to pronounce