It’s been a long, confusing, exhausting federal election season. We’re all tired. But put aside your worries, fellow citizens; it’s time for the invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election.
If you’ve read my articles on the 2017 BC provincial election or the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, you’ll know I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of non-Chinese political candidates choosing Chinese names. I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name—to the ridiculous—BC Green Party candidate Greg Powell’s (格雷戈里) bewildering word soup. I’m delighted to see that this year we’ve even had some news coverage of multilingual campaigning from the University of British Columbia’s student newspaper (their conclusion: nobody knows if it works or why anybody does it).
This election, unlike the provincial election in 2017, showed some clear differences between parties when it came to Chinese names. In the twelve central Lower Mainland ridings I searched, the Liberal party led the way with seven non-Chinese candidates displaying Chinese names on their campaign signs or literature. The Conservatives, on the other hand, by far led in actual candidates of Chinese origin (seven, to the Liberal and NDP’s one each) but only fielded one non-Chinese candidate who used a Chinese name in her own campaign. I was able to find four NDP candidates with invented Chinese names, but only one from the Greens.
Before we get to the juicy details, however, I’d like to take a moment to explain a little more about Chinese names—how they work, and how they’re made. If you’re only here for the gory competition, feel free to skip ahead.
The prototypical Chinese name has three characters, a single surname followed by a two-character given name. A smaller number of Chinese people only have a single given name, and a very few have two surname characters.
In the name above, Jia Junpeng would probably have inherited the name “Jia” from his father (Chinese tradition uses patrilineal surnames, but does not usually dictate women take their husband’s name after marriage). His given names might represent his parents’ wishes for his future or the circumstances of his birth, or simply suit their fancy. “Junpeng” might be translated as “gentleman with a bright future.” A friend from university was named “quiet and studious,” a name against which she rebelled vigorously.
As in other languages, there are always exceptions. This year’s prolific Vancouver newsmaker Meng Wanzhou’s given name (孟晚舟) enigmatically means “evening boat,” and her surname comes from her mother, not her billionaire father Ren Zhengfei.
While many East Asian names, for example Korean or Japanese names, can be translated directly into Chinese characters, Western names present a problem. As a character-based language, Chinese has no bite-sized phonetic components with which to build foreign sounds, and no dedicated script for writing foreign words as in Japanese. The only way forward is to use Chinese characters, preferably ones with innocuous or pleasant meanings, to sound out foreign names. From this system, you sometimes get monstrosities like this:
If you read this series of characters semantically (as I did when I first discovered them in a newspaper), you are confronted with the nonsensical phrase “hope pull inside eyeliner peace net ethical nanny conquer forest mound.” An experienced reader of Chinese, however, instantly recognizes the phrase as nonsensical and instead reads it phonetically, rendering, of course, “Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.”
When reaching beyond a simple phonetic reproduction of a name, however, there are more choices. Some foreigners who have spent a substantial amount of time in China are given wholly original Chinese names, like my name 林文杰 (Lin Wenjie), which has no phonetic relationship to my English name at all. Political candidates, however, are more likely to fall somewhere in the middle, creating a name that follows the rough rules of Chinese names (unlike Hillary Clinton) but that still reflects the pronunciation of their non-Chinese name (unlike mine.)
Political candidates in the Lower Mainland, or more likely their campaign staff, have found roughly four ways to transliterate their names, a rough taxonomy of which appears below, pulled from candidates in previous elections:
Each of these methods has its benefits and drawbacks. The upper two styles, which only translate one name, are simple and straightforward, but also read as childish and inauthentically Chinese (I happen to like Garfinkel’s name, but for complex reasons). This is about as sophisticated as a French woman named Françoise Duchamps translating her name into English as “Fran Swazzy.”
The second two styles are both generally more satisfying. The Chinese style name maintains the East Asian convention of placing surname first, but by doing so muddles the resemblance between how the names sound when spoken aloud. An attentive Chinese speaker could hear that “Shane Simpson” and “Xian Chongshan” were the same name, but might struggle to match “George Heyman” with “He Zuozhi.”
The Western style name maintains the cadence of the original English name, but muddles family name for given name. If Shane Simpson had a child who entered politics, she might end up in the odd position of bearing the same Chinese given name as her father, but a different surname.
These are difficult choices, and must be approached sensitively on a name by name basis. And this brings us to what you’ve been waiting for: The made-up Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election—ranked.
(This is likely an incomplete list. Please get at me about additions or corrections @NikoMBell. Many thanks to the friends, followers and ELMTOTs who helped compile it.)
- Neelam Brar (Liberal, Burnaby South) — “Nilanmu Bula” 妮兰姆. 布拉
This is the third election I have covered in this project, which I hope will give my words weight when I say that this is the worst invented Chinese name for a politician I have ever seen. As you may remember, there is a set of generally pleasant sounding Chinese characters that are often used to transliterate names, some more common than others. Brar’s name is a collection of the most banal and clichéd of these characters, adding no semantic power whatsoever while also managing to sound phonetically drab. Her surname, for example, combines the uninspiring characters for “cloth” and “pull”, while changing the beautiful sounding Punjabi surname “Brar” into the slightly comical Chinese “Bula.” But where her name really goes wrong is between the characters. Chinese contains a special punctuation mark, the “separation dot,” that can be used to separate parts of a non-Chinese name (as in Hillary Clinton’s name above.) Brar’s name could rightly be written 妮兰姆·布拉, but it is not. Somehow, whether due to error in her office or at the signmakers, her campaign signs seem to feature a normal English period, followed by a space. There is no excuse for this.
- Kyle Demes (Liberal, Vancouver East) — “De Musi” 德姆斯
This is a rather boring attempt, transliterating only Demes’ surname without much flair. The name is further marred by the use of 姆, an intensely feminine character, literally combining the elements for “woman” and “mother” and denoting a wetnurse or nanny. As is the case in English, there is somewhat more freedom in Chinese for women to use traditionally masculine characters in their names than the other way around. While I’m all for creative subversion of gender norms, a non-Chinese man running in a riding with over 20 per cent Chinese population against a wildly popular Chinese-Canadian NDP incumbent should probably stick to tradition.
- Joyce Murray (Liberal, Vancouver Quadra) — “Mei Liqiao” 梅丽乔
I don’t know what to think about Murray’s name. The characters are perfectly good, sensible and well-chosen; what’s odd is the order. Unlike any of the four forms I described above, Murray’s Chinese name, Mei Liqiao, runs the transliteration of her surname between the first and second characters. This is very odd in Chinese context, because it seems to split up “Murray” between surname and given name, while tacking on the transliteration of “Joyce” (qiao) on the end. Are we supposed to read this name in the normal Chinese fashion as Mei Liqiao, or is it actually Meili Qiao? Why place Qiao, a perfectly good Chinese surname, at the end of the name when you could simply reverse the order?
- Leigh Kenny (NDP, Vancouver Quadra) — “Li Kaini” 莉凯妮
Now we enter the territory of Chinese names that are fine, but mediocre. Kenny’s Chinese name, Li Kaini, follows the Western style pattern in a way that basically works. If I could ban any single character from use, however, it might be the final character in Kenny’s name, 妮 (ni), an uninspiring character meaning “girl” that is seldom used in Chinese for adults but is overused in transliterations, and undermines the gravitas of a respectable female politician.
- Kathleen Dixon (Conservative, Vancouver Quadra) — “Di Kailin” 狄凯琳
Up until only a few days before the election, I thought I wasn’t going to add a single Conservative name to this list, but at the last moment a friend texted me a photo of an election pamphlet with Dixon’s Chinese name in type so small that I had to call the campaign office to double-check the spelling. Dixon’s Chinese name is simple and good. Unsurprisingly, she shares a Chinese surname with NDP MLA Adrian Dix, and her given name, meaning “glorious gem,” avoids clichéd characters.
- Svend Robinson (NDP, Burnaby North–Seymour) — “Luo Si’an” 罗思安
Controversial and storied NDP politician Robinson has returned with a simple, elegant Chinese name, combining the common surname “Luo” with the given name “Si’an” meaning “thinks of peace” (apostrophes are added to Chinese names sometimes between vowels to show that there are two syllables, not one.) I think “Si’an” (say “SIH-AHN”) is an example of an elegant transliteration, roughly matching the sounds of the name Svend without bending itself out of shape.
- and 7. Don Davies (NDP, Vancouver Kingsway) — “Dai Weisi” 戴伟思
and Tamara Taggart (Liberal, Vancouver Kingsway — “Di Gesi” 狄格思
I’ve put Davies and Taggart, the two leading candidates in my own riding, together in one slot because they are most remarkable for their similarity. Both have sensible, authentic-sounding Chinese names that evoke but do not copy the English. What’s more, you might notice that they use the same final character; Davies is named “great thinker” while Taggart is named “discerning thinker.” This is particularly notable because Chinese siblings are often given similarly parallel names (one of my university professors and her sister, born at the height of the Cultural Revolution, were named “power forward” and “power advance.”) One wonders if this sense of sibling rivalry is an accident, or if the newcomer Taggart deliberately mimicked her opponent.
- Jody Wilson-Raybould (Ind., Vancouver Granville) — “Wang Zhoudi” 王州迪
What makes a chosen Chinese name not only good but excellent? For Wilson-Raybould, the difference is a touch of boldness. Her Chinese given name, “Zhoudi”, is a practical transliteration of the English. But while her surname could have tried to vaguely mimic the initial sound of “Wilson-Raybould”, or even worse the whole thing, she instead chose the everyday, ubiquitous Chinese name “Wang,” meaning “King.” There is no way that “Wang” is the closest phonetic match to “Wilson,” and this deliberate step away from transliteration is refreshing and displays genuine thoughtfulness.
- Jagmeet Singh (NDP, Burnaby South) — “Zang Miancheng” 驵勉诚
Remember everything bad I said about Joyce Murray’s name splitting up a given name between the first two characters of a Chinese name? Jagmeet Singh does exactly the same thing, and I don’t care because his name is so good. First of all, Singh’s name feels authentically Chinese in a way that Murray’s does not, obviating the need for it to follow his Punjabi name too closely. Second, unlike Murray, Singh does the right thing and puts the character most likely to be a surname at the beginning. It’s also worth noting that Singh isn’t even exactly his surname (he chooses not to use his original surname due to its ties to Indian class hierarchies). But whatever the case, what makes Singh’s name great is the semantic work that it does on top of the phonetics. “Zang Miancheng” combines the characters for “workhorse,” “exertion” and “trustworthy,” painting a picture of a tireless public servant, while still evoking the original sounds.
I might have placed Singh near the top of this list if his campaign hadn’t so thoroughly failed to make use of his Chinese name. It appeared on none of his campaign signs, and a helpful friend had to make two visits to his campaign office before they dug up a Chinese-language pamphlet.
- Terry Beech (Liberal, Burnaby North–Seymour) — “Huang Zhifeng” 黄志峰
I don’t know if Beech’s Chinese name is a very good idea or a very bad idea, strategically, but I have to place him near the top of this list for sheer individuality. He is the only candidate in any election I have seen so far who has completely abandoned any pretense at phonetic transliteration, and concocted an original Chinese name from scratch. And it’s a good name at that, entirely believable and shared by several actual Chinese political figures (Chinese names are repetitive enough that any good normal name is likely to be held by a politician somewhere, like “Jane Smith” or “David Brown.”). There is perhaps even a semantic element, with Beech’s given name translating to “aspire to the peak,” perhaps a reference to his metaphorical perch atop Burnaby Mountain.
I briefly thought of awarding Beech the top spot in this list, but then reconsidered after reading up on his campaign. While he has chosen an audacious Chinese name, I can find no evidence that he has done any other special work to campaign in Chinese, make his campaign accessible to Chinese voters, or earn the Chinese affiliation that his authentic name suggests. I don’t think fully original Chinese names are necessarily the best or the only path for political candidates, and in some cases may seem crass or exploitative if candidates fail to learn the significance or context of the names they use. I must give Beech credit for breaking new ground, but if he wants the top spot he will have to earn it.
- Bridget Burns (Green, Vancouver East) — “Peng Biyin” 彭碧茵
Like Singh, Burns has a name that does both semantic and phonetic heavy lifting, but she also helpfully put it up on her lawn signs. Along with a well-chosen and authentic surname, her given name means “jade-green bamboo,” a beautiful name that also evokes the imagery of her political party. Burns’ name proves that when done properly, a chosen Chinese name provides an almost unfair advantage by tailoring a candidates name to her personality or policies.
- Harjit Sajjan (Liberal, Vancouver South) — “Shi Jun” 石俊
Perhaps I simply have a weakness for two-character Chinese names, but Sajjan’s hits all the right notes for me. A two character name suggests a certain simple, earthy authenticity, and Sajjan’s two characters translate to “stone handsome,” conveying a sense of dashing ruggedness appropriate to a military man. The name is also unquestionably authentic (Sajjan shares it with a notable Chinese soccer player), and gently suggests the Punjabi pronunciation. Bold, original, memorable and tasteful, Sajjan’s name is the perfect balance for a chosen Chinese name.