My Name

My Chinese name is 鐘藝進. When I was growing up, we spoke Cantonese at home. The Cantonese jyutping pronunciation for 鐘藝進 is zung1 ngai6 zeon3. Breaking down each ideogram…

(As an insufferable teenager, I would joke my name meant “to advance the arts” to feed my bottomless, insecure ego).

HOWEVER – the spelling of my Chinese name on my Canadian birth certificate (as my middle name) is “Yuet Jinn”. There are two permutations of oddness here.

The first one is that my parents (A Vietnamese father and a Hong Konger mother) decided to use the Mandarin pronunciation of the name instead of the Cantonese. The Mandarin pinyin pronunciation is zhōng yì jìn. Which is fine, but how my parents spelt it – turning yì to “Yuet”, and giving jìn an extra “n” – is not entirely clear. I never asked why, but English was also my father’s third language by that point.

That said, Jinn with an extra “n” is just too good to not use as my literary pseudonym. Why wouldn’t I want to be accidentally named after an Islamic supernatural being who’s made of smokeless fire, can shape-shift, and possess humans? (Or, if you prefer, I could grant wishes).

But also – the “zh” in zhōng sounds very close to the English “j” sound, so I get the benefit of alliteration in “Jinn Zhong”.

شبيك لبيك 🧞‍♂️