And that’s just one class.

This is something about China’s way of learning English I was looking forward to long before I came. Students learning our blessedly complicated language get to choose an English name, and there’s really no guideline on what to choose. A few have the generic American- or English-type pseudonyms, but a creative few go really all out.

This is how I ended up with a hard rock fan named Bon Jovi. My class monitor (still not entirely sure what the job entails) in the same group decided to call himself Christ, because “it’s important, right?” Kinda, yeah. What’s the correct answer here?

Only You came from another student’s family name in Chinese. Clever, actually.

Other colorful names include several varieties of fruit: Orange, Lemon, Cherry and others. A few have asked me to give them names, which has been fun. One girl was choosing between Pheobe and Sophia. I couldn’t spell the first (is it correct here?) and the second was taken, so I left it to her. Another student was thrilled when I dubbed him Waldo. I just know that someday I’m going to ask, “Where’s Waldo?” and he’ll stand up.

Turning things around, I still don’t have a Chinese name, something else I’d been looking forward to. I’ve had a few people here write characters that combine to sound like Ke-Ri-Is or something, but I’m not sure what the individual words mean, so I haven’t claimed it, yet. Hopefully, I can have as much fun with nomenclature as my students do.

Maybe there’s even a Chinese rocker I can emulate.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 5:24 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.