What’s in a name? Peter Hessler on what English names can reveal about China
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You can get three months of The Spectator for just £15 and a free bottle of Pro Roger champagne if you go to spectator.co.uk forward slash jingle. This offer is UK only and subject to availability. Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.

There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues? Why do so many Chinese people choose such curious English names? You must have come across this phenomenon, whether they're names from a past century or surnames, nouns or even adjectives used as first names or even words that aren't real at all. I have a particular interest in this because my English name, Cindy, isn't exactly in vogue these days.

You might think this is a bit of a trivial question, but I think the question of English names goes deeper than just some odd words. I think these names reveal something about the China that gave rise to them. So I was pleased to come across another China watcher recently who is also obsessed by the question. Peter Hessler is an award-winning journalist whose 2001 book, Rivertown, was highly influential for its depiction of life in a changing China. I spoke to him recently upon the publication of his latest book, Other Rivers.

and keep listening to hear where the name Cindy comes from.

Peter Hessler, it's an honour to welcome you to Chinese Whispers. How are you? I'm doing fine. Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been very much enjoying your latest book, Other Rivers, which is a sequel of sorts to your first book, which made such an impact in the English-speaking China-watching world, Rivertown. For listeners who don't know these books, could you briefly introduce them? Yeah, I mean, I was sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. You know, I arrived in China without studying Chinese or without really having thought very much about China. And I was sent to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996.

And I was sent to a small city in Sichuan province on the Yangtze River. So a pretty remote place. And at that time, the Peace Corps was sending volunteers to a lot of these small places in Sichuan province. And I was teaching young people who were training to become teachers of English. So they were Chinese who were going to teach English in middle schools and high schools. So that was my first introduction to China in 1996, 1998. After that, I stayed in

in the country for more than a decade, became a journalist and a writer. And my first book was about that experience. Rivertown was about living in Fuling, the town where I lived as a Peace Corps volunteer. And so after that, I became a journalist and I didn't teach again until 2019. So a little more than 20 years after I had left.

I came back to China and I went to the same region to Sichuan. And I taught again the second time I was at Sichuan University, also teaching English. And so basically I had two different stints of teaching in China separated by, you know, more or less a generation, 20, 21 years.

And there are many interesting themes that both books pick up on. But there's one in particular that struck me, and that's the one we're talking about today, which is the English names that Chinese people choose. Now, listeners might think that this is slightly trivial, but I'd be surprised if people who have Chinese friends and family haven't often wondered this, as maybe I have myself. And Peter, maybe it's because my own name is quite rare, Cindy. Maybe it's more common in America, but in the UK, I've rarely ever met other Cindys around.

And for every new student you introduce in your book, you explain or you try to explain why they've chosen that name. I think it's important because personally, I think it tells us something about the China of the time. As you say, you span two generations. Is that also why you note them?

Yeah, I mean, it just, of course, it jumped out at us because we arrived without speaking Chinese. I learned Chinese as I lived in Fuling and eventually became fluent. But at the, you know, the first hour we were speaking English and these were our only English speakers in the town, basically, were our students and our colleagues.

And they introduced themselves with these names. And for most of them, they already had names and we taught them. There were a few classes where they were choosing names and we helped give them possibilities. But most of them had already chosen them. And so and at this time, you know, China had very little contact with the outside world in a small place like Fuling. Like none of my students actually had met an American there.

So you did have some students who had chosen names after people they admired. Like I had a student named Armstrong after Neil Armstrong. And I had a student who was named Helen after Helen Keller. And that was something I didn't realize that Helen Keller had been like a communist sympathizer. And so she was sort of seen as a heroine in China. So my student was aware of her. I had another student named Marx, you know, who was...

a party member and wanted to honor the communist tradition. So he called himself Marx. So you had all these, some of them were names after people they admired, foreign figures they admired. Sometimes they translated their names. So I had a student named Yellow. I had a student named House. I mean, this is because Chinese names, they could be very literal. So sometimes they would translate them like this. I had a student, one class monitor called himself North Marx.

And he told me that's because North is the traditional direction of authority. And he was like the class monitor. He was also a Communist Party member. And Beijing in the North is where the power comes from in China. And he'd also read that there was a British prime minister named North, who was, I think, the Earl of Northumberland. He'd actually been the prime minister when they lost the American colonies. So he wasn't probably the best figure to be named after. But I don't think my student North was aware of that. So you had a lot of students like that.

And then you'd like, there was a boy named Joy. There was a girl named Joy. You know, I had, you know, and I had a boy named Daisy, right? And I remember the dean coming up to me at one point, like somewhat distressed. And he's like, the boy in your class has chosen the name Daisy. And I said, yeah. And he said, that is a girl's name, isn't it? And I said, yeah, it is. He's like, well, I remember from the great Gatsby. But, you know, I just, I didn't do anything about it. I think he wanted me to force the kid to change his name, but I kind of liked it because he was this very tall, you know, sort of somewhat morose boy who wore a camouflage shirt

uniform every day because he had wanted to join the military, but his bad eyesight had kept him out of the military. And so I just liked having this really big kid named Daisy, like kind of this very silent presence in the back of my class. So the names are very distinctive. And of course, that was how you remembered the kids and then initially how you got to know them. There were two ways, actually. The other way was their clothes, because in the 90s, they never changed their clothes because and all of these kids had come from the countryside. They were from rural backgrounds. They had very little money and they usually wore the same thing every day, basically.

And so you would learn certain students by their outfits. That was how you memorized people early on. And then, of course, their names, and especially these names that really jumped out at you. You know, and some of them were great mysteries. Like there was a boy who called himself Young Sea, Y-O-U-N-G-S-E-A. And I never really figured out until finally later when I asked him. He's like, no, that was my Chinese beaming. My poet name, my writing name in Chinese has young in it and also sea like ocean. So I just did it for my English name as well. So.

So, yeah, it was very idiosyncratic, very individual. Yeah, and I guess there's no kind of cultural context in which to restrain them. You know, there's no idea of what gendered names are or what Christian names are. And in that kind of Chinese context, it's just like, well, why wouldn't you just have whatever sounds good? I mean, there are no restraints, basically. Yeah, no, especially in that era. And because they'd had so little contact, it was totally open. Now, you did have a few, like, I remember there was another teacher who,

One of my Peace Corps colleagues was teaching in a place in a town in southern Sichuan, and there had been a British volunteer there maybe the year before who must have been somewhat sadistic because he had named the entire class after cigarette brands. So there was like a Winston and a Marlboro and a Dunhill and there was like the whole class camel, you know, it was sort of awful, you know.

So sometimes people could be really cruel. Oh, that's very mischievous. Did the students know that that's what they were named after? I think they had at least gotten some kind of idea of it. I mean, because those brands were floating around China, too. A lot of times the students thought stuff like this was funny, too. I mean, they often didn't take it very seriously. You know, because I mean, in some ways it was so abstract. What are you going to do with your English name? Like...

And it turned out that some of them did end up using them. But at that time, they didn't really understand like China's boom was still mostly in the future, you know, in 1996, especially if you're in a small town in Sichuan. But yeah, it was a big part of the characters in a way. Like, I mean, one of the students I've written about, I've written about her now for more than 20 years was named Emily.

And she had chosen that name from Emily Bronte, you know, and she was very literate and a very thoughtful student. And in some ways, it really was the perfect name. I mean, it really, you know, you couldn't have chosen a better name for somebody like that. You know, so, you know, the names did stay with me, of course. I do remember them very well.

Why was there a feeling that they had to have English names? This is something, a question that sometimes people ask me, why don't you just use your Chinese name? So why for your students was it almost like a rite of passage to get an English name to the extent that the dean of the school might be concerned about what their English names are? Yeah, you know, I think it's based, I mean, I think now when Chinese come to America or go to Britain, I think it's become much less common now.

and it's more common to use a Chinese name now because I think people are just more familiar with it. But the truth is that the languages don't work that well together, right? I mean, like my English name, if you go by the official transliteration into Chinese is Bida Haosele, right? I mean, it doesn't sound anything like Peter Hessler, you know, and it's just, it makes more sense just to have a local name. And I think a lot of Chinese felt the same when they come here. And

And of course, there is a long tradition, you know. So you have, my wife is Chinese-American and her family, her parents had moved to America in the 60s from Taiwan. And one thing you notice if you know Chinese-Americans, they're like generational names. Like my wife's name is Leslie. Her name is Leslie Chang. And there were so many Leslie Changs. It's unbelievable. Like, you know, she's a writer. And when I told my sister, I was...

dating a writer named Leslie Chang, she went and found like Leslie Chang's book and read it. And it was entirely wrong book. It was like a different Leslie Chang because there's like so many of them floating around. And it's like, well, why are there so many Leslie's? It's because of Leslie Caron, you know, the French actress. So, and the same thing, there's so many Graces from that generation and so many Rita's after Grace Kelly and Rita Hayworth. So they would often name their daughters after these sort of Hollywood figures because

But it's funny, they didn't name the boys like Marlon Brando, right? They would name the boys like Albert after Einstein. And they named, you know, I knew a Linus. There were a bunch of Linuses named after Linus Paulding. You know, they named the boys after scientists, the girls after Hollywood actresses. It's kind of unfair. Yeah, somehow I'm not surprised. The Cindy that I'm named after is actually Cindy Crawford.

And sadly, the resemblance ends there. But the reason for that is because my mom was working for an American export-import company back in the 90s. And when I was born, her American boss was a fan of Cindy Crawford and gave her the name Cindy to name me. So I've actually had my English name since birth. Okay. Cindy is a common – I don't think it usually comes from Cindy Crawford, but I think it's partly because it sounds –

I don't know, it sounds a little Chinese actually, right? The name Cindy is not that much different from Chinese sounds in the language. And so I think it's always been a popular name. But what you're mentioning there, like often it is true that a colleague or somebody will help name the child. And I've given English names to a couple of my fooling students when they had children. I gave them their English names in a couple of cases. I wondered if there's a class element here because...

It's about in that early stage, at least in the 90s, when foreigners were so rare in China. If you were more educated, more urban, more cosmopolitan, you're more likely to come into contact with foreigners or even work with them or be taught by them. Whereas, you know, you mentioned, for example, your rural students like North or Yangtze, you know, they had, except until you got there, you know, not really any contact with English speakers. And so I wondered if

the usual unusualness of your name also kind of suggests of how much contact you've had with kind of Western culture. That's definitely true. Yeah. No, if I had been teaching in Beijing or Shanghai at that time, it's much more likely that my students would have had, there would have been more probably names from celebrities or from figures in the West. I would have had less of the direct translation, but probably also less rural. Like I remember I had a kid named Silence Hill and

That was his English name. Not, you know, silence as in the noun, not the adjective silent, which in some ways was a wonderful name. And he was a very like thoughtful. I mean, it was perfect because he was a very quiet kid, but he wrote very well and he was very thoughtful. So, you know, I think you were more likely to have those names from people who were from rural backgrounds.

whose parents had not been educated. I mean, most of the students I taught, their parents had hardly been to school. In some cases, they had not been to one day of school, and many of their parents were illiterate, you know. So this was a big transition for those guys. I mean, I had a student named Mo. He chose the English name Mo. And, you know, this was a boy growing up on the farm, and...

His parents had never gone to school. Both parents were illiterate and Mo trained to become an English teacher. And then after he graduated from our college, he was sent back to his village where he taught in the local school and he taught both of his younger brothers. And both of his younger brothers also tested into college. So you could think about the transition for this family. We have two parents who can't even read.

and they have three kids who end up going to college, and the first one actually taught the other two, right? So it was very much like this kind of bootstraps education that you could see on the ground, you know, that this was really happening. Yeah, so, you know, and Mo was one of the kids who was like a leader, like, you know, a class monitor, and he was one of the kids also who got a last name, because...

Usually they just use the first name, but by my second year teaching in Fuling, some of these kids decided that it wasn't fair because I had a proper Chinese name with a Xing, with a family name, and they only had a first name. So they started to give themselves family names. I had a student named Willie.

who became, I suddenly started getting papers with the name William Foster on it. And then it became William Jefferson Foster. I think he got the first part from Clinton, from William Jefferson Clinton, but I don't know where he got Foster from. And then there was a kid named George who became George Baker Frost. You know, it's like these kind of very waspy names. And then Moe became Moe Money when he took a last name, you know.

I mean, that's brilliant. I mean, some of these are very, very funny and witty. One that stands out to me is Anri as well, who just took the word angry and took the G from it. Is that right? Yeah, no, he was a poet, right? So he wrote poetry in Chinese, you know, also a farm kid, but was very literate and loved poetry. And he believed that a poet should be angry. This was the image of a literary figure in China in the 1990s, was sort of a young, dynamic, angry, engaged,

person. And so he chose the name A-N-R-Y. Yeah, he dropped the G. And it's never totally clear to me why he made the decision to drop the G. But of course, Angry would have been very different. But when I first had the name, I had no idea about any of this etymology. And I just, you know, I was looking at this word Anri and trying to figure out what it meant. And then later he explained to me. But yeah, sometimes there was a sort of funny, very idiosyncratic thought process that went into these names and how to adjust them.

This is something that you mentioned as well, that the idea of the poet back in the 90s is someone who should be angry. But why is that? Is that a post-Tiaman legacy? Or why should poets of that era be angry? Why did they have that image? I mean, poets were always really important figures in China. I mean, I would say that I think the

poetic tradition is the strength of the Chinese literary tradition. You know, if you're an American, I think the short story and the novel are kind of what is the foundation of American literature, that sort of prose and the voice of a writer. But I think it's quite different in China. You know, poetry is really special in China. If you're a Chinese student, you memorize Chinese

countless poems, you know, any educated Chinese can recite lots of poems, probably because they're shorter, you know, they're about a fifth the length of a Shakespeare sonnet, right? So it's easier to memorize. But it's also just because they're really important. So poetry is a special place there. I do think it's not, I don't know how much it's connected with Tiananmen. But it's, I think just that era was a period of intense change and reform in China.

And so there was just a lot going on. Young people were migrating, they were moving to new cities to find work. They were trying to figure out their place in this very new environment. And it took a lot of energy, it took a lot of guts, and that was often coming out of the poetry.

Andri, for example, the poems that he loved and the poems that he read over and over again, the modern poems that he loved, were from people involved in this process. One of them was very much about migration, for example. Andri ended up migrating. He went to Shanghai with something like $4 in his pocket, slept in a public square when he first arrived, found a friend there who helped him look for jobs in factories. I mean, this was a common experience.

path for somebody in the 1990s who's coming from a rural background. And that boy, Henry, you know, he found his way. I mean, he started at a factory and ended up in quality control. And he ended up sort of becoming an expert in this sort of factory management system that reduced accidents and that made factories safer. And he took a lot of pride in that. You know, he

And rightfully so. I mean, this is a kid who grew up with nothing, really, from a very poor place and became an educated person conversing in English and able to sort of move in this industrial world. It was a big achievement for him. And again, the name was appropriate. It took guts. I mean, this was a kid who needed to be courageous.

And one special part of your journalism is how much you've kept in touch with those students as much as possible over the years. And it's really interesting to see through your exchanges with them China's changes through their eyes. As you mentioned, you know, the changes that happened to people like Henry in the course of one lifetime. North is no longer a political figure. He becomes an elevator salesman. I mean, what we in the UK call Lyfts.

I mean, that in itself is a kind of a symbol of what has become important in China has changed over the years. And North was a neat kid. I mean, he was, as I said, a party member, but he never seemed very political. He didn't seem like one of the kids who was really into the government or anything, but he was just, everybody liked him. He was very personable. He's very calm. He didn't get angry. And so the

they made him a party member and they made him a class monitor because the administration could trust him and he could kind of interface between the students and the administration. That was his role. And it was interesting once he started a business, that's kind of what he did because as you said, he's putting lifts on the outside of buildings. So in this part of China, we were in the Three Gorges region. So a lot of...

you know, migrants are moved out of the low line places that were flooded by the new dam. And they moved to places like our city and they built these buildings very quickly to house these people. And often the buildings were 12 floors without any lift. Right. And so, you know, you've got people walking up to the 12th floor, you know, which in the 1990s was not that big of a deal. But as time goes on, people are getting older and China is getting more developed. And they're like, why am I walking 10 flights up a flight, you know, when I forgot my keys or something.

So what he would do is he'd go to these buildings and negotiate with the residents to put a lift on the outside, figure out where it could fit in. He had an engineer because he's not an engineer, but his job was to kind of interface with the residents. And in China, because everything is so intense economically,

especially when it comes to money, like it's a different fee for every different floor. So if you live on the third floor, you're going to pay more than the second floor, but you're going to pay less than the fourth floor. And they all have to know that they're paying, that they're not getting ripped off and that nobody's getting a better deal than them. And so it's just an incredibly complicated negotiation process. But that's what North was good at because he was co-operative.

And I would go along with him to these sessions where he's talking. And these people were just screaming at him about the elevator. Oh, no, those guys on the sixth floor. And sometimes what happens is the people on the first two floors get really angry because their values don't go up. But if you put a lift on the side of the building, then the guys on the 10th floor, suddenly their property value goes up from what it was.

And it doesn't hurt the people on the first floor, but they're upset, right? Because somebody else got something that they didn't get, right? And North has to deal with all this. And it's really perfect because this was what he'd been good at as a student as well. Yeah, really an industry of the time. And as Anne-Marie as well got more wildly and more

wealthy, he changed his English name to Alan. Yeah, I think he realized that some people like Henri, like what, you know, they couldn't pronounce it. They didn't know what it meant. He couldn't tell the story. Obviously, he's not going to convey this to them. So eventually, he changed his name to Alan. And he chose it from, you know, from Alan Iverson, who was a great American basketball player in the 2000s. And, you know,

Anybody who knows American basketball, Iverson, he was distinct to me. He wasn't very big. He was like 5'10 or 5'11 from a very tough background. I think his mother had been 14 years old or something when he was born. And just an incredibly tough, gutsy player. And the Chinese really admired him because they saw him as an underdog. And so a student like Henry...

This is who he connected with. When he chose his new English name, it was going to be after Allen Iverson because that spoke to his background. Yeah. And that's not the only basketball influence that is even in your kind of social network. Because fast forward to your years at the Sichuan University more recently, you had a student called AJ named after Air Jordans, the shoes that Michael Jordan created. Yeah.

I mean, I just thought that was really interesting in terms of, you know, a sign of how much basketball has cut through into kind of Chinese popular culture. Yeah, it was interesting, though, but it's more of a consumer. So like there was early, like in Henry, he's choosing Allen Iverson because...

That figure speaks to him because he came out of poverty. He didn't have any advantages and he succeeded. So Henry's connecting with that. The student named AJ, he chose the name AJ for Air Jordan because he collected Air Jordan shoes. Now you look at Henry when he was a kid, he was like a tough guy.

Little kid from the country. He was one of the best basketball players. I used to play basketball with him. He was a really good basketball player. AJ was like an urban kid, right? He's one of the only children from this new generation. He looked, you know, he's well-fed. He's not like a skinny, scrawny, tough guy.

peasant kid like I was teaching in the 90s, he's a collector of Air Jordan shoes, right? So it's almost like he's coming at basketball from the consumer side, you know, whereas a kid like Henry was coming at it from the inspiration and from the athletic side. Yeah. I feel like a lot of this conversation is actually just about the American influence of

You know, I've mentioned the basketball, Cindy Crawford. And then you had a student called Serena as well, named after a character in Gossip Girl, which I just think is so interesting, just kind of tracing who are the American figures that have this kind of influence on Chinese people. Yeah, and she was embarrassed by it. So she was from kind of like a third or fourth tier city in Sichuan called Nanchong.

And it's not a very developed place. She was very smart, very good student. And she kind of learned English like a lot of motivated kids largely by watching television. And so she watched this show Gossip Girl when she was in high school and got English. Her English became really good as a result. But then she got to university and she kind of realized that it's a little uncool to have to be connected to this American somewhat pop show. It's not like she's not naming herself after Emily Bronte or something.

So she was a little embarrassed about it. She didn't tell me for a long time. And actually, I figured it out because she mentioned one time in her writing something like, oh, you know, I don't want to tell you where my English name came from. So I just kind of did a look with Serena. And then I saw the gossip. I'd never seen the show, but I was like, oh, that must be what it is. And then she told me that it was. But yeah, so sometimes these kids would have a little bit of regret and they would rename. In her case, she decided not to rename, which I'm glad. I think it kind of fits. I think it's a good thing.

I think it's a nice name. And I just wonder, you know, you mentioned what's cool and what's not. If there are these kind of geopolitical dimensions to names or these kind of like social prestige associations, what do you think it says that more of your Chinese students and more Chinese people in general are using their Chinese names rather than kind of adopting English names? Do you think it says anything at all? I mean, I can imagine some people saying, oh, you know, it's more cultural confidence or nationalism or whatever it is.

Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think it is more cultural confidence. It's also there is a more, you know, stronger awareness of China than there was 20, 25 years ago. People have just seen more Chinese names. They've heard them more. You know, if they see an X in a name, they're not going to be thrown off the way they used to be. You have to remember also, you know, the sort of the way of transliterating was very different when people were coming from Taiwan. You know, like the way they would translate. Like my wife's name is Chang, C-H-A-N-G. Nowadays, that would be Chang.

because in Chinese it's Zhang, right? And usually it's Z-H-A-N-G. So if she were coming from China now with the same Chinese name, her family name would not be Chang, you know? So there are these little differences and some of them speak to language, but it's all just basically contact

and sort of the growing power of China, both culturally and economically. And so there's a stronger awareness. And also just people are more savvy. And they sort of understand, you go to America or Britain, there's a lot of people with all kinds of names, right? It's not like everybody has to take the name Oliver or something. And so they often keep their Chinese name. I was actually told off once by a shopkeeper here in London. I think he was Pakistani. And I showed him my ID, which has my Chinese name, which is Xiaodan, X-I-A-O-D-A-N.

And he's like, why don't you use that name? You should use the name that your mother gave you. You know, you should be proud of that name. And I was like, God, I'm just here to collect my parcel. But I think there are still a lot of difficulties with pronouncing those sounds, especially the way they look from the Romanization, from the mainland side of things, in an opinion. And I hear all the time still people butchering Xi Jinping's name, you know, Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping.

Whatever it is, you know, I think we still have some way to go. And I wonder if it's because Chinese names operating a different way to Christian names in a sense that they're not repetitive. You know, you can have almost like an infinite combination of Chinese names. And so lots of the names that you do see are probably quite new and you don't learn how to say them. Mm hmm.

Yeah, no, I think that's true. Although you do have certain names that, you know, that are really common, like Wong Wei, right? It's like, there's so many, like, I remember one time my wife was like at airports, she heard somebody saying, which Wong Wei? Somebody's on the phone, like, which Wong Wei are you talking to? You'd be saying in Chinese, it was like, you're talking about the short Wong Wei or the fat Wong Wei? Or that, you know, he's like going through all these Wong Weis because there's a million of them. So we kind of do have these names that become really common.

Well, also actually, 建国, you know, very classically patriotic ones, build the nation, right? That's what it means. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's all those names. That's kind of from my generation. So a lot of these kids who were born, because I was born in 1969, and a lot of my Chinese contemporaries have those names, like 建国, yeah, as you said, 建国.

build the country? What are some... You know, there'll be a military name like a fang, right? Or jun, right? Like for soldier, right? You know, for... So you really can date certain Chinese. And those names in Chinese, they would say they're very tu, you know, like they're really...

rural, earthy, like uncouth in a way, you know, sometimes. And some of those people, of course, became very educated and they kind of laugh because they're with this, you know, with this kind of crude sounding name. Yeah. The thing that in your book made me laugh so much was this joke that the students at Sichuan had calling Trump 川建国.

Which was just, I just thought it was hilarious. Obviously, Trump being a Chinese transliteration of Trump and then calling him to build a country. And actually, my first interpretation of that was because of MAGA, because he wanted to build America. But you say that the kids thought it was because his policies actually helped to build China. So he's actually doing it like a sleeper agent role. Yeah, it's very clever. It's a very clever and ironic

nickname and it's said a lot very efficiently, right? Because his Chinese name was Chuanpu, but by calling him Chuanjianguo, what they mean is like, it's Mr. Trump who's going to build China, you know, because they thought he was so incompetent at trying to, you know, hurt China, basically. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned, you know, the people from Taiwan and obviously Hong Kong as well. I think actually people from Hong Kong have some of the most extraordinary English names that I've ever come across, you know, earlier this year.

I was interviewing Hong Kongers called Coleman with a K. There was someone who was interviewing called Ducky. And actually doing research for this, I found an article from South China Morning Post a few years ago where they were literally interviewing people about their names. There was someone called Money, someone called Josephine. So I wonder if that, because a lot of our discussion has been about the mainland due to our own experiences. But why do you think Hong Kongers can have such extraordinary English names? Because they're...

of exposure to Western culture is longer. And you would think that that actually kind of constrains them more into the kind of more traditional names. Yeah, you know, I never lived in Hong Kong. But my wife lived there, and I know that it is true that you have these incredible names. It's a reflection of British contact, but it may also have been a reflection of a distance, you know, as well as the closeness. I mean, one thing that always struck me about Hong Kong when I would go there, like in the 2000s,

In the 2000s, I spoke Mandarin Chinese and I spoke English. But if I went to Hong Kong, it was very hard to communicate with anybody. And this was a country that had been British for whatever. And now it's Chinese and they don't speak either of their colonial languages.

overlord languages, right? Which says something about people and their relationship to authority. Now, I think nowadays it's a little different. When I go to Hong Kong, I hear Mandarin a lot more than I used to. And like, if I get in a cab, most of the cabbies now can kind of understand some Mandarin because they get a lot of Chinese tourists from the mainland. The Hong Kong relationship with British had a certain distance, right? There wasn't that much closeness in some ways. And people in the Cantonese culture kind of did their own thing. So maybe the few that did

cross over into the British educational world and become English speakers and choose English names. Maybe it led to this kind of craziness because there aren't really British. They kind of know they're not British and their contact with Britain is not all that close in some ways, but they do have these names floating around. They're just grabbing, you know, whatever kind of crazy names they want. But it is interesting. Yeah, they were famous for that and much more, you know, much flashier, I think, than

And, you know, certainly then say Chinese would emigrate to America, you wouldn't have the same kind of names. Yeah, definitely. And Peter, finally, I just wanted to turn the tables on you because you have a Chinese name, as you mentioned, He Wei. And Wei is the character for greatness or big. Is that grand ambitions from when you were 20 something? Yeah.

Well, actually, what I would usually would say is the way is from Waga, you know, because that's the Chinese for Viagra, you know. And this was a joke that the Chinese, my students were making that joke in the 1990s that my name was connected to Viagra. And they were making the same joke at Sichuan University 20 years later. Some things never change. They would make these references to Waga. They're sort of classic, like the same joke over the years. Yeah, so this was a name that I had nothing to do with. I mean, we just showed up in the Peace Corps and they gave all of us Chinese names. None of us had studied Chinese.

And they gave me the family name He, H-E, because it's the start of Hessler. And then they just gave me the way, which is pretty random. It really just there was no no connection to my name. And it was sort of funny because a lot of the other names they tried to kind of transliterate a little bit or make it sound like the English name, which almost never worked well. So like my my site mate, Adam Meyer,

They named him Mayor Kong, which just sounds awful. And like it also sounded a little bit like a type of fertilizer brand in Sichuan. And so he got so sick of people like making fun of his name and all this stuff. So he changed his name after a year. He changed his Chinese name. He had all of the students –

make proposals. What should his name be? And then he had this whole, he had a whole bunch of classes and they, and they voted on it. And so he let the students name him. So Adam was actually renamed by our students. The name that he chose then was Mei Zhiyuan, which is like Zhiyuan, like reaching far away. You know, it kind of has, it's a pretty common Chinese name of that time. Yeah. So, so those, and that name became important, right? I mean, I showed up the first day and they say, yeah, you're He Wei. And I don't have no idea what that

means, like, whatever, that's fine. But it became a big part of who I am. Like, I mean, that's, you know, when I go to China, that's who people, that's how they know me, you know, and my books are published in China, some of them, and people refer to me as Chloe, they don't refer to me as Peter Hessler. So it is that this kind of makes you think about the randomness of a name. I liked it. There's a section in Rivertown where I talk about how

It was kind of liberating because you have this new name and it's part of your new identity. When you're in another language, in another culture, you don't have to be the same person you always were. And I liked it. I liked the way that like He Wei, he was very friendly. He was definitely friendlier than Peter Hessler because he had to be because he didn't speak Chinese that well. He was a little bit stupid, you know, which I kind of liked too. Like, you know, people had to be patient with them and they could repeat things. He could ask dumb questions too. You know, that's, I like that. As a journalist, I was used to where I could ask questions

Right.

Well, it's good to know that the name embarrassment also works the other way around as well, because I am a bit embarrassed by Cindy. Although, mum, if you're listening to this, you know, you did very well. Well done. But Peter, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for indulging me in my slight obsession with names. No, no, I think it's an important topic. I'm really glad that you're thinking about it. And yeah, yeah, good luck. Thanks so much for having me on.

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