My Chinese name is Qi Sheng Yang, the first part being the family name on the father’s side. Phonetically, Qi has several meanings in Chinese, but my version is roughly equivalent to “chess”. Sheng, as I’m told, is an admittedly immodest term describing a sage or a master. And Yang is to rise, to fly higher.
“Rising chess master”? Clearly there is an agenda here, and unsubtly so. Both my dad and grandfather wanted me to be a great Weiqi player, which is a board game that falls under the umbrella of “qi”. As it turns I’ve sort of neglected that particular destiny, though I do know how to play.
One year when we went back to China, we were visiting Tiananmen Square when we came upon a peddler in a tunnel who offered to write our names in a variety of elegant ways. I must have expressed some interest, because my mother and aunt seemed like they would’ve been happy to ignore him. After my mom explained which characters were in my name he produced a number of heavy-paper cards and started scribbling on them with a silver gel pen while the two women stood watching skeptically.
He explained the myriad ways he was writing the name. Backwards. Forwards. Vertically. The white one was special: it was upside-down and reversed, so that you’ll see the characters if you hold it vertically looking at the back through a light, while simultaneously resembling a western signature in the horizontal orientation. It is a little mind-boggling. And presumably he knew how to do that for any arbitrary set of Chinese characters (there are a lot!).
Finally he handed them to us, and even my mother and aunt admitted that it was a good job. So perhaps it is not always so bad to take a chance with a peddler in a dark and lonesome tunnel.
