TL;DR

  • my name is Wang Banban. It’s written as 王班班 in its original script. Wang is the family name and Banban is the given name.
  • If you like, BanBan, Ban-Ban are both okay.
  • I use “WBB” as my initials.
  • Don’t ever write “B. Wang”, as my student card in Leiden did! I hate it!
  • I’m fine if it’s not reversible, but I’d be glad if it’s in the correct order.
  • Banban can mean “in order”, though it’s the result of a beautiful coincidence, see below.

Hey dear visitors, what’s in your name? Name is perhaps one of the first gifts you received in the world. Maybe your parents give you a name from one of their models, their relatives, their patrons, or their best wishes. There are harmful names as well. A girl can be called “Zhaodi” 招弟 (i.e. “requesting a younger brother”) due to strong misogynic traditions; or she can be called “Ya’nan” 亞男 (i.e. “second to a male” or “equal to a male”) because the family desperately want a boy. Everyone has their story about the name, and many of us also have a Starbucks name partly because some of the society think our names are odd. For those who don’t know, there can be quite much meaning in a name, in Chinese, Vietnamese, and others.

But what about my name? Ah that’s a long story to tell, and many parts are, of course, second-hand.

I was born in a cold January in Guangzhou, very south in China. My parents share the same surnames, as Wang is a super common surname, just like Müller in Germany and Nguyễn in Vietnam, and they don’t change surnames after a woman is married. I was then lucky to have escaped from a quarrel on using whose surname (which is important in current feminist discussions!).

Then, give me what name? As they didn’t know my gender yet, many of the names were designed to be okay for both boys and girls (they didn’t think of gender fluidity though) It seems my paternal grandfather didn’t care that much, as I’m not his first grandchild. My father was active in the Cultural Revolution, urged the family to call me “Zeya” 澤亞 (i.e., bringing grace to Asia), as (1) an hommage to Mao Zedong (bringing grace to the East); and (2) following the trend of mentioning Asia after 1990 Asian Games in Beijing. My maternal grandpa or Laoye was lovely. He suggested a name “Chunyi” 春依, which can both mean “leaning on the spring” and “what the spring (春 Chun) leans on” (his name has 春). This sounds a really good name and when I still had the idea of having a child I’d have loved to name them this.

But it seems my mom had the last say. At the thirty-third week she dreamt of a name, in which the two “Wang” 王 characters were connected with a heart (忄). She wrote it down and here came “Banban” 班班.

Notice the difference? Yes, there’re two dots in the character for heart, but only one for the thing between two “Wang”s. The latter, in fact, is derived from “knife” 刀 ! In this way, Banban actually cut up the two Wang’s, not that anyone would know …

Anyways, Banban brings me luck and troubles. A reduplicative name (or “ABB”) is usually taken as diminuitive or feminine, so questions like “what’s your real name?” or “are you a girl or a boy?” came frequently in my childhood. And who could have known that many Communist princelings are given reduplicative names, including Bo Guagua, Li Tete? It causes me problems in Chinese-speaking area and I really thought of changing my name. Wang Banban is easy in writing and especially in cursive. Many then read my cursive signature as “2 212 212”, very easy :)