Roses by Any Other Names

So my Chinese name is 万吉平 (wàn jí píng) which was given to me at a Chinese Meetup group in Seattle.  The family name is really as close as they could get to a "v" sound (although I had urged them to pick a name that started with "b") and the given name 吉平 sounds a lot like JP.  Taken all together, it's a very auspicious name, apparently.  Chinese people are surprised and delighted when they hear it, to the point of congratulating me.  I really have no sense of how lucky or unlucky it is. 

I like it a lot, but I'm sure that at my new job I'll be going by "JP," or maybe "John Patrick."  We'll see.  I hope at least the Chinese people in the office call me 吉平. 

So my name is pretty sticky; for some reason, everyone seems to remember it, at least to my face.  There are just a few other Americans whose Chinese names are really sticky.  The thing about these Chinese names is that to Americans they are very not sticky; they don't sound like names, they just sound like thousands of other Chinese words I don't understand, and so they are impossible to remember.  People have told me their names three or four times, and I still can't recall their names.  I used to have this problem in English; but now I find it much easier to call the Americans by their English names (at least in my head). 

Everybody else has secret nicknames.  Including the teachers, since they are all either named Li or Liu or Lin and it's crazy confusing.  We have 8 o'clock teacher, who teaches our 8 am class; 非常好 teacher who is famous for saying 非常好 very enthusiastically (whom I refer to in previous posts as the Freight Train), there's Watermelon teacher, who eats watermelon for dinner because she thinks she's getting fat.  These are secret nicknames; they don't know they have them yet. 

As for students, we have Columbia girl (originally from Columbia), Running guy, Dance girl...  If I've been given a secret name, I don't know about it yet.