Nomenclature

This is what my name means.

Before we were born, my grandfather drew up a list of names for our parents to snatch up on our behalf on a first-come-first-served basis. As the story has it, by being the second-born girl in our generation, I managed to get the second-best name on the list, beating out Selina by two years and also slightly annoying her parents.

Here it is in traditional characters: 潘絢愷 (pan1 xuan4 kai3)


Today as we went from office to office meeting various managers and higher-up sorts, I ended up in front of a man who asked what the last character in my name means. Now that you know where this is headed, I'm going to veer off a bit.

The first character, of course, is Pan, the family name. That's what's engraved on the giant headstone in the graveyard in Springdale where we all have plots.

Once, back in either junior high or high school, Selina brought up the topic of Chinese dictionaries during a phone conversation. At that point I'd already dropped out of Chinese school and was mostly uninterested in the topic, but when we started wondering what our names meant, I asked my mom to pull one out and show me how to use it. This was, of course, before the internet and looong before zhongwen.com or any of those other fancy online dictionaries. Dictionaries for the traditional system are really fascinating things, and definitions are itemized by radical and stroke count. So you really kind of have to know what you're doing in order to navigate one. Anyways, we looked up the character pan, and discovered that it refers to the water in which one washes rice. It's not one of those words that ever comes up in conversation, at least not as far as I can tell, having been relegated to the status of a popular surname instead.

Xuan is the generational name for girls in our family, so Christine, Selina, and I all have 2 out of 3 characters in common. I looked this up with my mom too, and she returned that it meant "bright." After I got into college and was regularly looking up words on the internet, I double-checked all of these, and got basically the same definitions. The MDBG dictionary corroborates the meaning as "brilliant," but also adds "adorned," "swift," "gorgeous," and, uh, "variegated." Whenever I hear Chinese people describing my name to other Chinese people, they describe this word by using the phrase "xuan li," which means gorgeous or magnificent. But usually people can guess which one of the various xuans we're dealing with, and I'm guessing that it's common enough in girls' names. For example, no one's ever mistaken the xuan in my name for the one which apparently means "lathe/thread in screw."

I remember back when I first started attending Chinese school, we were in a dark ornate part of the church, seated around a big table, and since we were most of us too young to have any clue how to go about writing our names on our papers (in traditional, no less), the teachers were doing it for us. It went swiftly for the most part, but then they got to me and the process stalled. There was some confusion as to which kai served as the last third of my name. They discussed briefly, then wrote down two characters, showing them to me and asking if either seemed familiar. I didn't even really know what I was looking at. After some more deliberation, they decided it was more likely to be one than the other, and wrote it down and moved on. It was SO COOL to have my name written down on my stuff, right? When class ended, I went to show my mom right away and she was nonplussed. She told me that that... wasn't my name. I was stricken. We went up to the teachers and they said that they had been confused and showed her the other option that they'd come up with. She said, "oh no, it's not that one either." Eh? said the teachers.

So, this is the character that everyone invariably assumes it to be. 凱, as in 凱旋 (kai xuan). It means triumphant, and the phrase means to return triumphant (according to MDBG).

When I started Chinese 109 my freshman year at Cornell, there was one morning that the teacher went around the room and commented on everyone's name. I was told that my name was a boy's name.

While hanging around the copy shop in Baotou waiting for one thing or another, the owner and his daughter(?) asked me if I had a Chinese name. I gladly told them, and the girl-- who I'd liked pretty well up until that point-- turned to the owner and said that it didn't sound good.

When I told the fruit seller what my name was, he said he liked it. I had to write it out so that he could see the character. He said it was unusual, but that it made more sense once knowing the character, and that it was fitting.

In Muping, they just called me 小潘 (xiao pan) which means, literally, Little Pan. It's a common enough nickname though, since according to my host here, that's what they used to call my dad in college.

In Baotou, no one would call me by my Chinese name. Instead I was Kai se lin, to go with the official name on my documents, or, for some reason, Cathy/kai xi/combination of both. The one time in my life I've ever let the name Cathy happen to me, and I still shudder a bit.

I understand the necessity of going with a Chinese version of the name on my passport since the name by which I've been known in my family all my life is devoid of any officiality, existing nowhere outside of my family, our friends, certain classrooms, and my Chinese homework. How weird is that?

So, today, I was sitting with my host at the desk of one of the important people with whom I ought to be acquainted and he asked me what my name was. After hearing it, and saying it, he asked me about the meaning. What does the "kai" mean? From our dictionary, my mom had come up with "victory," and that's the meaning I've held to throughout the years. Mrs. L didn't know, so I told her what I thought it might be, and she translated for me. They discussed it a bit more and she decided to have one of the girls in her office look it up when we got back.

In the office, the Chinese Literature major was assigned the task of checking online for the definitive answer. I expected her to eventually just come up with a few synonyms and phrases and have that be the end of it. Instead, she very sweetly gave me a great explanation.

Back to the character: 愷. It's made up of two parts. The first, the line and two dots on the left, is the radical and it's actually a variant of 心, which means heart. The other part means happiness or joy. According to zhongwen.com, it also means celebrate. So one meaning is happiness or joyfulness. She went further to say that it describes someone who is good and can bring that joy to others. Another dictionary definition is "kind." There's a second meaning, which basically translates as "easy-going." I was surprised to not hear the meaning that I believed it to have all this time. Then she found one more. It also refers to the type of song played by a party, I picture an army of some sort, after a victory. Her favorite was the second, easy-going.

Ok sorry, this ended up being far longer and more involved than what I'd initially intended, which was a paragraph-- maybe two-- just about today's encounters. But anyways, this morning I loved my name, but I had no idea that it was so... cool. It's funny to me a lot of times that I was given an English name that people appear destined to be misspell for eternity, and a Chinese name that's so easily misunderstood.

I felt really happy while she was explaining it to me, like a shade was being lifted or like a massive spit-shine was taking place. Aside from actually being able to share this information with others from now on, I discovered that my name is something that's really worth living up to. I remember when I cornered Prof. Zimbardo after his lecture at the WAC and asked him to write one of his favorite inspirational quotes in my book, he sort of misunderstood and instead wrote an inspirational message directed at me. Basically, it's the hope that whoever I meet, I manage to make them feel special and glad to have known me. That's what popped into my head during this conversation today.

Hopefully I'll be able to do justice to these three words that are such a special part of who I am. I've got my fingers crossed, anyways. Remember: be optimistic and kind, joyful and at ease, and smile until people start smiling back.