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Jan. 23rd, 2003 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynHave just remembered why none of my Chinese-American characters have names that are quite right. At the time I created them, someone on an RP newsgroup or MUSH bulletin board or something similar - it may have been the WORA Forum - was complaining about how the vast majority of Asian characters online conform to certain expectations. The Lesbian Japanese Schoolgirl was a particular problem for them, but they or someone commenting on them mentioned the way Asian characters played by Anglos tended to have very, very bad names, since most people made up something that sounded right rather than using a proper naming resource. (I.e., a book on baby names, or a friend of the appropriate culture.) Someone else complained that 'not ALL Chinese have compound names, but you'd never know it from online', and so in an effort to be non-online-stereotypical I saddled my characters with two-part rather than three-part names.
In my own defense, I was drawing the majority of my character names from the sources I had at hand: Sima Qian, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe II, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the non-translated names in Barry Hughart. I cannot remember anyone in Sima Qian or the other sources having a three-character name, save for those who had the rare two-character surnames. (Xiang Yu, Xiang Po, Chang Liang, Sun Qian, Cao Cao, etc.) So the entire Xiang family got named that way, because at least I knew I was using names that had precedent. I might not have been clear on what the names meant, but I knew I was using culturally/regionally appropriate names that were correct for their gender. Unlike, say, the girl savaged a while ago on the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
marysues community - she created a younger sister for the Harry Potter character Cho Chang... and named her Keiko.
This doesn't mean I don't want to correct the problem. It's one thing to have a kid with a two-character name, but an entire family of 'em is probably a bit much. I'm just saying, that's why it worked out the way it did. See? I'm not that much of a goober.
In my own defense, I was drawing the majority of my character names from the sources I had at hand: Sima Qian, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe II, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the non-translated names in Barry Hughart. I cannot remember anyone in Sima Qian or the other sources having a three-character name, save for those who had the rare two-character surnames. (Xiang Yu, Xiang Po, Chang Liang, Sun Qian, Cao Cao, etc.) So the entire Xiang family got named that way, because at least I knew I was using names that had precedent. I might not have been clear on what the names meant, but I knew I was using culturally/regionally appropriate names that were correct for their gender. Unlike, say, the girl savaged a while ago on the
marysues community - she created a younger sister for the Harry Potter character Cho Chang... and named her Keiko.This doesn't mean I don't want to correct the problem. It's one thing to have a kid with a two-character name, but an entire family of 'em is probably a bit much. I'm just saying, that's why it worked out the way it did. See? I'm not that much of a goober.
