My first name, Ming , means "light". To write it, you use two Chinese characters. The left one means "the sun," and the right one means "the moon". The two characters together mean light all the time, day and night.

My last name Yao  doesn't mean anything in itself. It's just a last name like Jones. But the two characters making up of it, when looked at separately do mean something. The left part means "woman," and the right part  means "many," many, and many, like a billion, only more. So that means more than Wilt Chamberlain, right?

A Life in Two Worlds

Chinese names contain a spectrum of cultural information. It is one of the favorite topics the Chinese enjoy talking about. The process of exploring the meaning probably leads you to a close friendship.

The most common family names in China are li , zhang , and wang . There are now nearly 100 million Chinese with the same family name. In Mainland China, women don't take their husbands' family names after marriage.

Chinese given names always follow their family names. People believe that the given names contain invisible fate and visible meaning in the choice of characters. Therefore, when elders name a newborn, they usually take several factors into consideration: astrology, birth date, a fortune-teller's advice, and the form, pronunciation, and meaning of the characters.

Some given names indicate the parents' good wishes and high expectations for their babies, like xi (happiness), gui (preciousness), cong (cleverness), li (beauty); while some others convey the love of nature, such as, feng (peak), hua (flower), and so on.