Call Me “Mr Chin"

Call Me “Mr. Chin”
by Parris A. Lyew-Ayee

In our modern day Jamaica, a Chinese name is almost as commonplace as Smith, Anderson, or Williams in our cosmopolitan society, which truly reflects our motto “Out of Many, One People.” But after some 150 years of the Chinese in Jamaica, and with third to fifth generation descendants no longer steeped in Chinese culture, with the passing of the older ones, there is a great deal of misunderstanding of the meaning and use of Chinese names. This piece is directed to the younger generation Chinese, who did not have the benefit that I had of the older generations to explain things, and to anyone interested in our Oriental names.

The fundamental thing to remember is that, unlike in Western names, the ‘family name’ comes first, followed by the ‘given names'. In my case, my family name is “Lyew” and my given name is “See Shung”; put together this would read “Lyew See Shung,” and I am Mr. Lyew, not Mr. Shung. This has been the basis for much confusion over the years, including within my family, where my great-grandfather’s name was “Lyew Ah-Yee”, which morphed to “Lyew-Ayee”. When he assumed the English name “John” for business purposes, it was written as “John Lyewayee”, which quickly led to his being called “Mr. Ayee”, hence losing the true family name. So, in order to keep the link between the true family name of ‘Lyew’ and those who had started using the ‘Ayee’ portion of the name, we reverted to using our great-grandfather’s full name ‘Lyew-Ayee.’

There are other family names being used like this which keep the full name of the father or grandfather, such as Ho-Ping-King, where Ho is the family name, or Chin-Yee, where Chin is the family name. Another source of confusion is in the spelling of our names. In my case, variants of my family name are Lyew, Leow, Leyow, Lyeu, Liew, and Liao, with the last spelling being the most ‘accurate’ spelling in English. But the true way to know if the family name is the same is to look at the Chinese character of your name. Table 1 shows the Chinese characters for the most common Chinese names in Jamaica.

Knowing the Chinese character is also important, as the pronunciation of the family name will be different in the many Chinese dialects that exist. For example, Jamaican Chinese names which sound different but are the same character are as follows:

1.Chin, Chen, Chan, Tan

2.Wang, Huang, Ng

3.Moo, Wu, Goh

4.Chang

5.Lee, Li

6.Fong, Fung

7.Chong, Chung, Cheong, Cheung

8.Young, Yang

Although most of the Chinese names in Jamaica can be traced back to Guangdong or Canton Province of Southern China, these names go back in excess of 3,000 years, and register linkage to our ancestral villages and areas.In another piece we can look at the relationship names used by our Chinese friends and brethren and their meanings.

The Chinese surname Chin is probably the most common surname in the world. What the Hakka (which is the dialect group of most Jamaican Chinese) call Chin is Chen in Mandarin, Chan in Cantonese, and Tan in the Fuchien and Chao-Chow dialects widely spoken by the Chinese of Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

So the next time you are hailed as Mr. Chin or Miss Chin, it is simply an acknowledgment of the fact that there are more persons in the world with this surname than there are Browns or Smiths or Joneses!