Wednesday, June 13, 2007

93 Wangs, no hyphens

I really enjoy figuring out the history of peoples names, geographically, politically, and what they mean in their home anguage. It's sort of fun, and a good conversation starter when you first meet people. Also, if you are reading my blog, I am quite sure you know that I like to meet all sorts of people from all over, and just introduce myself and start talking them.

In San Jose you get a lot of Trans, or Nyguens, which are Vietnamese, to give an example.

Well it seems that Chinas government, which is a democracy that is controlled entirely by one private not democratic party, is getting sick of the lack of last names in their country.

In a recent article aobut this, it was found that there were 93 million wangs in Chinas a 1.3 bililion citizens. Thats a lot of wangs. So the government is starting a new program to encourage the creation of new last names via the combination of the names of their parents.

Very Berkeley - esque. My high school had so many hypenated last names... it got quit econfusing. However, China is proposing to ake them one word, like if the mom is a Zhu and the dad is a Zho, the kid will be Zhouzhu.

I just hope they dont have the problem that Berkeley does with second generation hypenated individuals ending up with 4 last names.

It really sucks for scantron tests... bubbling in your name.

The love of my life, Sarah U.M. had an epic hypenated last name. When we were still together, to demostrate my love to her I would randomly spell her entire name, including the last two, while profesing my love. It was quite cute, and she apreciated anyone who could spell and pronounce her last name.

Anyways, silly tangent. It was cuter in person, I swear.

Here is the source
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070612/lf_afp/lifestylechinasocietynameoffbeat_070612065246

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Like the Kellys in Ireland. I think it's the second most prevalent name.