Gan = in Chinese is actually a boy's name that means bold, adventure
Fu = a boy or girl name meaning fortune or wealth
Ren = can mean forbearance or tolerance but the particular pinyin (symbol) that is used for Lily's name means the Confucius principle of humaneness or benevolence
According to some research I have done, in Lily's orphanage, Gan is a name that is given to all children residing in Jianxin SWI. There are a lot of children that are brough to Jianxin from other orphanages because Jianxin is one of the orphanages that participates in the international adoption program in China. The second name, Fu in Lily's case, denotes the orphanage in which the child originated. Lily was always in Jianxin so Gan Fu is the name for all children who have been at Jianxin since they were found. Ren is Lily's only unique name. That's why she will keep this name. She is called FuRen in the orphanage so we may call her this in the first months and it may stick with her as a nickname.
1 comment:
We also made the decision to keep our daughter's unique name, far before we found out who she was. Her Chinese name was Lu Qing Rong, again, the name Lu is the surname of the children at the orphanage. Originally, we were going to keep only the name Rong, but a Chinese American friend advised us that many times, it's best to keep both names because they could belong together...kind of like the name Susan in English, and keeping only the Sus or An part...it's not the same as Susan. Also, depending on how it is written, one name could be a descriptive word and the other could be a noun, and in Chinese, it is important to keep the descriptive with the noun. We decided on keeping Qing-Rong (we added the hyphen for legal purposes as suggested by another friend who's name is Qing-Wen) as her second middle name because the pinyin fits for both to be kept, according to two Chinese American friends.
It was important to us to keep her Chinese name, even though it was not the name her birth parents gave her. It was the ONLY thing she had that was HERS when we adopted her, and we felt strongly that it was not ours to take away from her. We also decided to keep both names because Qing Rong is a "fixed name that belongs together.
Sometimes we call her Qing-Rong as a fond name for her. And we did call her Qing-Rong and Cadence interchangeably for the couple of months, to ease in her American name for her.
She's 6 now, and the other day, I noticed that she doodled her ENTIRE name on paper First name, second name, Chinese name, last name. So, she does identify with all of it, and Im so glad we kept it legally for her. It can then be her choice to keep it or not.
Post a Comment