S5-E12 – Names… Too Many Names!

THE TAIWAN HISTORY PODCAST – FORMOSA FILES

TRANSCRIPT

S5-E12 - NAMES...TOO MANY NAMES

Release Date: May 12, 2025

Time: 30:00

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript was created by AI; it may not be entirely accurate. Any errors are the result of the AI transcription, and Formosa Files is not liable for the content in this transcript. Thank you, and use AI responsibly 😊

Welcome to Formosa Files, OK, so we've covered some rather heavy topics recently, crime, shipping tragedies, death, and destruction. We thought it might be nice this week to have a lighter topic. So, we're going to look at names, given names, especially family names.

There's going to be surprises and fun along the way, but no death or destruction. So, let's dive in. Names, we've all got one.

I forget who said it, but what was it? A person's name is to that person the sweetest sound in any language? In general, yes. Unless you're about to get chewed out because you're in trouble with the teacher, mom or dad, or the wife. Because you've not cleaned up something properly.

If I say, Eric Michael Smith, is that the world's sweetest sound for you? No, that was when my mom was angry. Yeah. Anyway, let's give a quick overview of how names work here in Taiwan and point out differences with Western naming practices.

Sure. In Taiwan, names usually have three characters. So, the first character, the first Chinese character, is the family name, which comes from the father.

And the next two characters are the given name. Occasionally, the given name is a single character, such as U.S.-based director Lian, although in the West, his family name gets moved to the end. So, he's known as Ang Lee.

Yes. And sometimes the surname is not a single character. There are two characters.

These are typically for Mongolians and Tibetans. And Manchus. Yep.

And the Uyghurs from the northwest. For example, Wu Kai-she. He was a prominent protest leader in China in 1989 at the Tiananmen Square protests.

He fled China and has called Taiwan home for the last few decades. Another difference between American and Chinese names is that Chinese names actually don't have a middle name, even though there are three characters. Right.

And the names of parents or relatives are not recycled. So, for example, I'm named after a favorite uncle, an Uncle John. That wouldn't happen here.

It's funny that it's one of the most common names in the world. Right. So, but also a beloved uncle.

I have to confess, though, that I have an uncle named John Smith. So, yeah. And you're right.

But, you know, some families use what they call generation names. So, you see brothers or sisters sharing one character of their given names. So even my two daughters have the same middle name or central character.

The central character, yes. And a note about married women. Unlike in the West, they keep their maiden name.

So, a woman could be Cai Tai-tai or Liu Xiao-jie or something like that. Yes. So, the Tai-tai is the husband's name, family name.

But yes, she still keeps her actual original maiden name. And as I understand it, in more recent years, I think they made it legal for the kid to choose the surname of the mom if they want to. That's right.

Not many choose that, but it's available. OK, another question. What are the easiest and hardest surnames to write in terms of the number of strokes in the character? Hard ones, I don't know.

There are some rare ones, but among the more common names might be mine. Ross is transliterated as Luo. 18, 19 strokes, I think.

Yours, Smith, should be Shi, an easy one, but you didn't go that route. Yeah, I'll tell the story. But before I do, can you write your own surname? Slowly.

Maybe you should try the simplified version. I often use the simplified – gentizi – for my wife's last name, Liu, because that's just too many strokes. OK.

And as you said, so a lot of people named Smith, they use Shi, Li, Shi, the Shi, right, history, that character. And it's a square with a line through it, another one. So, one, two, three, four, five, six.

Ah, OK. But one day in 2002, I come walking out of a building and I look up at this billboard and it says, In theaters now, Shrek, which is exactly my name, Shrek. Shrek.

So, I was like, I think I got to change that. And I went ahead and just went with Ai-Rei-Ke, so it's just my name, Eryk. It has got this little grass at the top and then the father radical, I think, at the bottom.

It's also very easy to write. And my daughters are happy that they have an easy name to write as well. Well, if you wanted a really easy one, you could have gone with King, Wong.

Oh, Wong. Yeah, you're one, two, three, four, right? Four strokes, yeah. There's another one, though.

I love this, Ding. Just two strokes. It looks like a capital J, but unusual.

I think if you dig through the archives, you might discover that even the character for one is a surname as well. OK, that would be the easiest one, obviously. Yes.

All right. Well, moving from unusual, let's look at super usual family names in Taiwan. It's different than China.

OK, so the 10 most common surnames in Taiwan. You get no points, John. You get minus points for guessing this one.

The most popular one? Let me think. Let me delve into the recesses of your mind. Yeah, recesses of my mind, yes.

Thank you. Chen. 2.6 million of Taiwan's 23 million people had that surname and surprisingly, only one president so far.

Yes. I actually did a calculation earlier. It's just a little over 11 percent of the population.

It's a lot. Yeah, every classroom has a couple of them. Yeah.

So, imagine you're at the airport. Will a Mr. Chen please come to the service counter? Not exactly useful. Yeah, the only thing less useful would be the Korean equivalent with a Kim.

Yes. About double the Chen percentage, about 21 percent share the surname, Kim. Oh, I don't know how they how they work that, man.

Kim, of course, is from the Chinese surname Jin. Jin, gold. Yes, yes.

Which is a name here, a family name here, but unusual. Yeah. But anyway, 11 percent for Chen, that's enough.

Kind of makes your very common surname of Smith look quite special in comparison. And, you know, the commonness of Chen is reflected in the Famosa Files episodes we've done. When you say common surname of Smith, are you talking about my Chinese version or the English name Smith? English name Smith.

It's the most common one in English. Yes, in every English-speaking nation. But you're right.

Yeah. Think about all the Famosa Files episodes we've done. OK, we did a series on former president Chen Shui-bin, the only president named Chen.

But we had a vice president named Chen. And further back in history, Chen Di, a literati explorer. His report from his 1603 visit was the first important Chinese account on Taiwan that we know of.

Then one very popular episode we did was on Taiwan's most notorious criminal, Chen Jinxing. Speaking of criminals, we did one on another Chen serial killer, the demon of Jiayi. Oh, yes, we did.

And another Jiayi reference from you. No worse than your Kaohsiung patriotism? Well, to be fair, this entire podcast is made possible by another Chen, the Chen Chi-chuan Foundation. Chen Chi-chuan was the former mayor of Kaohsiung, and they support our program.

I love Kaohsiung. Kidding aside, it's one of Asia's gems. OK, good.

You're back in my good graces. So clearly in the surname contest, Chen is the winner. But most people might not guess the second most common one isn't Chiang or Wang or something.

It's Lin, the two trees. It's a very respectable second place, nearly two million people. Third place goes to Huang, which is the same character as yellow, isn't it? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Huang. OK, I'll quickly run through the other top 10 family names in order of popularity. We have Zhang, Li, Wang, Wu, Liu, Cai, and Yang.

In the early days of Qing rule in Taiwan, these family names were more like clan names, you know, with villages or areas dominated by a certain surname. Exactly. Yeah, most Han Chinese immigrants to Taiwan came from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian Province.

And these are not like super faraway villages. We're not talking about the north of England and the south of England. You know, they're relatively nearby.

And they speak similar Minan or Hokkien dialects. Yeah. But they were constantly at each other's throats.

You're from the wrong village on the wrong side, death to the Chens, this kind of family names. These were identities and created these dividing lines. And I'm serious.

They fought like crazy for centuries. Yeah, I've read that surnames like Chen and Lin were usually from Zhangzhou and Li was more often from Quanzhou. I'm not sure, though.

And the indigenous people of Taiwan, of course, had their own naming system, often tied to clans or geographical features. During the Qing Dynasty era, they were encouraged to adopt Chinese surnames. And then during the Japanese period from 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was under Japanese rule.

They didn't push Japanese names on people early on. But during the Kuomintang movement in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Japan was fighting in China, Taiwanese were pressured to adopt Japanese style names to show their loyalty. Most Taiwanese, however, didn't change names.

We talked about this before, right? There were tiers like tier one, two, three versions of righteous Taiwanese. You know, the more Japanese you got, the higher you were raised in the level and changing your name was part of that. But despite material benefits like better food or promotional chances, yeah, most of them did not change their names.

And then Japanese rule ends in 1945. We have post-war Taiwan. The KMT have just finished eight years of war with the Japanese.

So, when they come here, they're not too keen on Japanese things. Yeah, I mean, think about that. And maybe that can give us a little bit of compassion for some of these people who came over.

They had had a rough time and they come to Taiwan and it is so Japanese. Yeah, it must have been quite galling for some of them. Anyway, in May of 46, the KMT authority has announced people of Taiwan, you are citizens once again of the glorious China, this time the Republic of China.

So, get back to your Chinese name. No more Japanese names. And we are graciously giving you three months to revert to your original Chinese name or at least find one or something.

Which I think was OK with most people. Most, but of course, not all. There were quite a few indigenous people looking for, well, they can't revert to a Chinese name, can they? They don't have one.

Right. So, they're going to have to take new names. And in a hurry, getting these new names isn't some carefully studied and considered process.

They were assigned new Chinese names in a random and haphazard way by household registration officials. And of course, this is 1946. Taiwan's in chaos.

It's a difficult transition. Taiwan's poor, hungry. There's disease outbreaks, shortages of everything.

Anger at the situation would soon lead to the February 28th uprising the following year. So, it's a mess. Many aborigines who should have been given the same surname, OK, they got the same surname.

They're given different names and conversely, different families. Maybe they were living in the same household. They're given the same name.

A complete mess. It weakened family and clan ties. And in a few unfortunate cases, it raised the horror of incest.

So, you meet someone you like, you feel a connection. But despite the different family names, this new loved one is a close relative. Not cool.

Yeah. Hang Chuan's Taiwan in Time column covered this issue. He cited a tragic example featured in a 2002 documentary called What's Your Real Name? By Maiyao Bihu.

They're two Bunan lovers with different Chinese surnames and they discover their relatives. Yeah, that's terrible. That article looks at the indigenous fight to get their names back.

Yeah. So that started with a small protest in 1985 in front of the Wusih Incident Memorial in Nantou, requesting the government return them their true names. And that would mean, though, that if, you know, their name was Molag Tatan, for example, you would have to turn that into either Chinese characters or write it in English.

And it was a big ask at the time for the government. Yeah. Did you notice the name, the place name there, Wuxia? That's a place with some history.

In 1930, indigenous warriors descended on an athletic competition at a school and killed a lot of people. And there was a lot of bloodshed that followed. Yeah, they killed men, women and children, sadly.

And the Japanese didn't hold back with their retaliation. They went full out and just so much bloodshed. But anyway, the 1980s movement for names continued.

Indigenous people demanded the right to be able to use their own names. And like I was just saying, so do we use English? Well, it's a Romanized language. But yeah, Chinese characters, too, I think.

Don't quote me. Let me check here. I've written down 1995 next to aboriginal names being allowed, but using Chinese characters.

And yes, yes, since 2001, indigenous people can use Romanized versions of their names. OK, but I think relatively few aborigines took advantage of this. Yeah, I could understand why.

No kidding. Foreigners with experience of websites, bureaucratic systems will be nodding their heads, thinking, yeah, I know. I understand why the aborigines didn't want Romanized names, because they cause so many problems.

They do. When I go to a bank, they ask me to sign my name, right? A signature. So, I do my signature and they're like, we can't read this.

I'm like, yeah, it's a signature. Then they go, oh, do it again, please. So, I write, you know, Eric Michael Smith.

They're like, oh, but on the book, it says Smith Michael Eric. So please do it that way. OK, OK.

And even if it was a Chinese name, right? If there's too many characters, poor kid in school has got to write mala salu kalusang or something like this. You know, it's bu fang bian. Yes, reading for this episode, I came across an interesting article.

There's a case of a man changing his name to something very rare. Characters that cannot be found in a dictionary, a standard dictionary. OK, I'm shuddering in horror of what you are about to tell me.

There's a man surnamed Huang. He's a technician in a government department. He changed his given name after a numerologist claimed his and his brother's names were harming their parents' health.

So, he and his younger brother's names were what? I don't get this. Mutually antagonistic is the phrase that they conflicted. The two brothers' names conflicted.

And so, they changed their names. Following the name changes, their parents' health improved. Huang's new name, however, had rare characters found only in the 17th century Kangxi dictionary.

And do you think modern computer systems could handle those characters? Oh, I didn't even think about that. Wild. Yeah.

Not even in the... OK, OK. Yeah, so... You have a name that can't be entered into a computer or you can't do anything. Can't do anything, yeah.

So, lots of problems. And one example of this was one night, Huang suddenly became ill. This was in the middle of the night and he headed to an emergency ward at a hospital.

OK, I've given you the quote. OK, here. The quote from the article says, Unfortunately, the nurse on duty had never seen the two strange characters before and was unable to enter his name into the computer as he rolled on the floor in pain.

In the end, he had to plead with her to give him an injection for the pain and we'll discuss the name problem later. Yeah, you can picture it, yeah. This is horrific.

My arm is sticking out of this. Look, look at the broken bone. Can we worry about the name later? Well, the story gives a good warning about the possible dangers of changing your name.

Yeah, and I say changing your name, officially changing it, not just giving yourself a nickname. Yes, as I understand it, you are legally allowed to change your name three times in Taiwan. That's how it is now, yes.

And I know, I'm sure you do as well, tons of people who have done so. Absolutely, yes, yes. Way more common than at least in America.

Much more. This one bit from a Taiwan Panorama article from 2005, it starts with this statement. Changing one's name is all the rage in Taiwan.

Techniques for choosing a new name include ones based on the I Ching, the Chinese zodiac, and luck enhancement methods. The article says name changing was a popular trend of recent years, and this was related to the Ministry of the Interior easing restrictions on name changes in 2003. So, this article 2005, yes, there was a wave of books and websites offering people help in choosing new names.

So, the following years after the 03 law changes, it becomes even more common than before. Like you said, a lot of people have changed their names. Guess the reason.

You know a lot of criminals. Yeah, criminals, no. It's really like 90% fortune or luck.

I mean, in my wife's family, there's so many, and it's just because some fortune teller said, oh, this is not right for this part of your life. You know, this needs to be, and they could do it. Yeah, so they've experienced some setbacks, could be money, health, love, and they're looking for a change of luck.

And what can bring a change of luck? Change your name. And sometimes people have changed their name more than once. Sure.

But like you said, there's a limit. So, you better think carefully for your last choice. Make sure it's the one you want to be stuck with.

So, before you could change it twice, then 2015, I think three changes were allowed. Yeah, correct, yeah. And a few people discovered this restriction that it was three the hard way a few years back.

Yes, 2021, Taiwan experienced a quirky phenomenon. What could we call it? What would we call it? Is it the salmon chaos? Sure. But I prefer incident because that's the traditional.

Okay. The salmon name incident. There was a media buzz about this because a few hundred individuals legally changed their names to include the Chinese characters for salmon, Gui.

Why would someone legally change their name to salmon? And the answer is rather disappointing. Yes. It's not like there's a salmon in the Zodiac animal or it's a symbol of great luck or something.

These name changers wanted to take advantage. Just they wanted to capitalize on a promotion by a restaurant chain, a sushi chain. If they change their name to salmon, actually salmon, they would get cheaper or free food.

Obviously, you didn't explore the promotion carefully enough. It was you get a discount if your name's a homophone. Okay.

So same sound, different characters, but people who had the exact characters for salmon, what did they get? Oh, right. If you had an official ID that proved it, the exact characters, then you ate for free with up to five other people. Yeah.

But who's going to have that name? Well, quite a few people went for it. All right. If it was you and I, John, we were just like, “jian dao shi tou bu” and then whoever loses has to go.

Okay. Yeah. So, this promotion led to a surge in name changes with people adopting names like Salmon Prince and Meteor Salmon King.

Oh, terrible. You're there at your job interview a few years down the road, you know, Mr. Chen Salmon. But in general, Taiwanese officials were not amused.

They criticized it for being a waste of government time and just being shallow, no pun intended with the fish. There were debates in the Taiwanese parliament even about, you know, should we put amendments to these name change laws? Some lawmakers were saying we need stricter regulations to prevent this kind of silliness. Most of the participants who went with this salmon thing, they reverted to their original name, but some of them found themselves swimming upstream because their new name was already the third.

And that's it. I have no sympathy for them. No sympathy at all.

What shallowness, stupidity, lack of consideration for the restaurants trying to, you know, make a living. So greedy. So, you're concerned about the capitalist angles to this.

And it wasn't necessarily a good look for Taiwan. Indeed, a very bad look for Taiwan. But I think there was one detail missed out, which actually makes Taiwan look really good.

Okay. It's not widely reported, but this promotion for free or discounted sushi, the promotion was put on the Facebook page on a Monday, and it's only good for the upcoming Thursday and Friday. So, three days to change an official name and get a new printed ID card with a new name.

Exactly. Three days at most. So, the fact that so many could do this, is that not an incredible example of Taiwan government department efficiency? That's a very positive spin on this insanity.

But no matter how easy it is to change your name, Promotive Files would like to offer a public service announcement, not encouraging people to do that. Think of all the difficulties you would have later. Banking, taxes, car, scooter licenses.

You got to change all those things. So maybe not. Not very filial either, is it? It's not respectful to one's ancestors.

So, we were looking for reasons for changing one's name. We mentioned luck and free sushi. Thankfully, that's just a one-off weird news story.

But another reason is people not liking their name. They might think it is strange or low class. So, let's look at some of those examples.

Okay. Of low-class names, how about Cai Tou? Vegetable head or Shui Niu? Buffalo. Water buffalo.

But these are examples from like the early KMT days. Farmers, I think, choosing carelessly. I would like buffalo, but not vegetable head.

And then superstitious reasons. Maybe an ordinary unglamorous name, a modest name. And that would mean the child is less likely to have evil spirits attack it with a disease or accidents or something.

This, in many cultures, they call their kid dumbhead or something so the spirits don't attack them. And back in the old days, when baby girls were often seen as a disappointment, this was reflected in their name. Like Jiao Di.

Jiao means to beckon or invite and Di means younger brother. Wow. Yeah.

So together you get invite a younger brother, indicating the parents would like a male child in the future. Oh, I'm sure that did nothing for their psychological self-esteem. Man.

Or a girl might get just a really lazy name. Something like Er Mei. Second daughter.

Sometimes used as an informal household name. But then sometimes actually a legal name. Not much thought put into a name like that, was there? No, but thankfully girls are much cherished today and their names reflect that.

One area in which Chinese names continue to cause problems is at school. And that's connected to history class. Yeah.

So Chinese names can be a headache when it comes to history. I think it's one of the reasons history as a school subject here is less popular than for students elsewhere. Taiwanese students usually describe history as hard and boring.

And the hard part often comes from the complexity of the dating systems, you know, this year of the emperor's reign, the ROC year and so on. Yeah, exactly. But talking about emperors, you get then the multiple name problem.

Right. Not just emperors. Let's take Chiang Kai-shek, for example.

Okay. Okay. Chiang Kai-shek.

CKS for short. President, as you've pointed out, John. President of the ROC from 1928 till his death.

Elected again and again. Legally elected repeatedly until his death in 1975. The Wikipedia page for him has an excellent section just on his many names.

This section is nearly 900 words in total, but we won't go into that much detail here. No, no, no. But let's try to make it a bit more comprehensible.

Every city in Taiwan and many a town, if not all, has a Zhongzheng Road. It's named after CKS. Yes, and the name Zhongzheng carries the meaning of uprightness, correctness.

Zhong, central. Zheng, correctness. For such a positive name, you'd think, well, somebody bestowed it upon him.

But no, it was chosen by Chiang when he was about 30 years old. Right. Not unusual at the time to choose a so-called courtesy name for yourself.

But it is odd, isn't it? You could call yourself modest greatness or something. Listeners, you are welcome to suggest courtesy names for John and I in the comments. That would be nice.

So that means his full name became Chiang Zhongzheng, but the surname is usually dropped. Right. So, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei is, in Chinese, the Zhongzheng Memorial Hall.

And it seems the name he chose for himself later was an attempt to have an association with the founder of the KMT, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who went by the name Zhongshan, literally Central Mountain. And every city here has a main street called Zhongshan Road. Oh, yes, it does.

The most important street, usually. If CKS had this courtesy name, it would be easy enough. But it actually gets more complicated or interesting.

So, when he was born, he was registered as Chiang Jiutai, a so-called register name used for formal occasions, but not by people outside his circle of relatives. And unlike in the West, where you get a name at birth and you keep it, in Chinese tradition, the family waited a number of years before officially naming their children. In the meantime, they used what they called a milk name.

And Chiang Kai-shek had one of these as well. Chiang Ruiyuan. When 16-year-old Chiang went away from home to a high school as a student, he chose a school name.

A school name, Xueming. And the one he chose for himself, Zhixing, which means purity of aspirations. And it's not just what he used in school.

It's what people knew him by. I mean, people were like, hey, purity of aspirations. We're going down to the pub.

Right. Yeah, he used it for the next 15 years or so. So, when he joined Sun Yat-sen and the others in the early nationalist movement, that's what they called him.

So, when are we going to get to the name Chiang Kai-shek? We're kind of running out of time. Yeah, it's not easy. Okay.

He didn't switch to it right away. He first used it as a pen name. This was in 1912 when he was in Japan studying.

He started to use the name Chiang Kai-shek as a pen name for articles that he wrote. But his name had two pronunciations. If you read the characters in Mandarin Chinese, it's Chiang Jie-si.

Right. So, Jie-si, very different from Kai-shek, but the same name, the same characters. Kai-shek comes from the Cantonese.

CKS, Chiang Kai-shek was not a Cantonese speaker, but the KMT were based in Canton in modern day Guangzhou. Over time, Kai-shek or Jie-si soon became the name he was known for. Right.

And it means something like as firm as stone. And that name worked out okay for him. He was rather firm in his rockiness, stubborn, and a survivor like stone.

Yeah, he did well other than losing China to the communists. But yes, that's a story for our upcoming summer series on Chiang Kai-shek. Looking forward to that.

So, Eric, for foreigners out there considering getting a Chinese name, any advice? Okay. Actually, yeah, I do have some. Don't try to be too clever, too funny, or too original.

You might end up with something rather weird or childish or having awkward connotations. Ask some Taiwanese friends, maybe get some honest feedback. And if it's a surname, think about the fact that you might have kids and they're going to have to write that.

So long as in dragon. Yeah, it is a surname, but I don't really think your kids are going to be happy about having to write that 50 times a day. Agreed.

Yes. And there are some established Chinese equivalent names based on phonetics for sounds. Right, Shi for Smith.

Shrek for your Smith.

Ha ha.

Ok. That’s all the time we have today.