Notable Chinese Names Worldwide

Shortly after I wrote the post about my name, I am Beautiful, I was contacted by a writer who is collecting Chinese names worldwide to include in a book explaining Chinese names and their meanings.

I’m including the most of the email below as I think it’s a really interesting project and I’m of course honoured to have been invited to participate:

An email from the professor

“My name is Dr. Y. S. Yow, I am an Australian author.

I am writing a book on notable Chinese people world wide. The book is published in English, and explains Chinese names and their meanings. For each word I choose up to 5 prominent names as examples. (up to 10 names are listed under surnames).

Examples of our listings are as follows:

薇 [wēi, ㄨㄟ] A type of fern. Other spellings include ‘Wai, Way,
Wie, Wui’.

NAMES: 薇讳 [wēi huì], 晓薇 [xiǎo wēi].

PERSONALITIES:

CHEN Xiaowei 陈晓薇 [陳曉薇], President of Chinese gaming company The9 Limited, a leading online game operator in China, former head of China.com, China ’s first Nasdaq-listed portal.

Violet Vera WANG 王薇薇, U.S. fashion designer, best known for her wedding dresses, former fashion editor for Vogue magazine; author of “Vera Wang on Weddings”.

YONG Wui Wui 杨薇讳 [楊薇諱], Malaysian politician, member of the State Assembly of Sarawak.

ZHÀO Wēi (Vicky Zhao) 赵薇 [趙薇], Chinese film actress and pop singer; listed amongst the top 10 best known personalities in China Forbes 2008); featured in “Red Cliff”, “The Longest Night in Shanghai”, etc.

Professor Xiaowei ZHUANG 庄晓薇 [庄曉薇], Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, U.S., develops and applies advanced optical imaging techniques to study the behavior of individual biological molecules and complexes in vitro and in live cells.

……… ^^^

We would like to add your name if you could provide us in both Chinese and English, we would only list your name upon verification of its accuracy.”

My name in Chinese

I didn’t have the facility to create Chinese characters on my PC so I emailed Dr Yow a description in English of the Chinese ideograms making up my name:

“Ooi - chinese character meaning “yellow”, same as Wong

Yang - “reflection”, the same ideogram used in the word for camera and taking photos

May - “beauty”. ”

Interestingly, Dr Yow did not have Yang in the list of ideograms on his website so I had to send him the written characters - see the photo. Embarassingly, I couldn’t actually remember how to write my name in Chinese. My mum had written it down for me years ago on a scrap bit of paper and I turned the house upside down to find it - to no avail. So in the end, I had to call my mum in Malaysia and ask her to write it again and fax it to me! What a failed Chinese person am I!

Dr Yow has now added my name to the book and also added the character for Yang to his growing list of Chinese name characters on his website.

For more on Dr Yow

He has also published other books: see his webpage
http://www.yitseng.net/chinese%20dimensions/. He also told me in his email, “For details of one of my books, the premier of Western Australia wrote the foreword, and the Minister for Multicultural Interest launched it at Parliament house last year. Another of my books entitled “Innovation in China – the Dawn of the Asian Century”, will be published soon.”