Names

 Our sense of individuality comes from this word/words that identify us. Not many of you heard of a Chinese last name Moy. This name comes from Toisan/Taishan which is a large city in the Guangdong province with a population of 1 million. They have a dialect called Toisanese/Taishanese  which is similar to Cantonese. Contrary to popular belief not everyone speaks mandarin on a day to day basis, though the national language, most people especially in the southern part of China speak the regional dialect more often and only speak mandarin when those kinds of speakers come. Going back to my name which in mandarin is Mei goes back to a time in which in ancient China in which the patriarch Mei Bo or Earl of Mei tried to convince King Zhou of Shang to change from his erratic and corrupt ways. (I thought Earls were a European thing, guess I learn something new everyday!). However Mei was  beheaded for his actions. This story is similar to John the Baptist trying to convict King Herod that taking his Brother’s wife was morally wrong. Later which John got beheaded. As a result of Mei’s noble actions his descendants held on to the surname which was later changed according to different cultures and dialects. ie. (Moy) I thought this story behind my surname was quite interesting and made me look back at Chinese history appreciate my name which I gave little thought to.





Below is my Chinese name (Traditional)

梅明章

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You know what really grinds my Gears? Pt2

 Ok for most of y’all reading this, this doesn’t apply to you. However it will. Filing income taxes is a pain to do. Sometimes corporations will file them for you if you get lucky. But a majority of Americans have to file it themselves. First you print off the 1040 and grab the numbers from your W-2 and do the rest from there. However if you want to get a tax refund you have to report expenses relating to healthcare or tax deductible donations and a bunch of other things. After finishing the taxes your brain would probably be fried because of how complicated it is. The math isn’t though, but putting the right value on the right lines is straight up cancer. It’s like the IRS exists just to make taxes more complicated. Oh yeah and if you mess up you could get an audit, fined, even worse jail time. The real is reason is why? Well it’s all about money. Most countries have a system called “Return Free Filing” in which the government sends you the tax bill and you check it to see if it was d
Read more

Milkman's thoughts

Inside Milkman’s Thoughts Note: Temporarily moving away from modernism and looking through a different lens.  I was one of high class and with extensive wealth. When I saw the seven days, I took no pity on them, but rather judged them based on their attitudes and on how they took on others and blame but themselves for their disadvantages. I saw them as losers, failures and scum, going around harming others, mainly due to themselves being hurt by the same society. They have a mentality of entitlement, that this society owes them, due to what they’ve been through.   Guitar is a man who never made his dream of playing a guitar.   Porter, is the town drunk (pretty self-explanatory). With nowhere else to go, no one to call friends, made a group to mainly rebel against the dominating force, the white people. I had plenty to do and people to enjoy. I really didn’t care about the whites injustice towards members of my own community. I viewed Guitar as a radicali
Read more

Ways to Remember

Image
How History and People are Remembered There are countless means that people can keep the memory of others alive.  It is usually through tangible ways like writing, photographs, songs, plaques, building and more. Key events in history are relived in many books, movies and memorials.  We don't really pay attention or concern on how people are remembered, even when we come across an article, see or hear about a notable person from the past.  In class, I realized that besides memorials,  there are numerous ways to remember what is significant. As the world changed and evolved, so has how we remember the past. With modern technology, artists, architects, and writers have developed more abstract and more open ended avenues in doing so through tv, movie, and social media. Books  In class we learned about how the book The Things They Carried reflects the experience that the soldiers in the Vietnam war faced. The odd nonlinear structure of the book manifests the issues and the
Read more