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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

What's your chop?

A chop is a stamp of someone's name and is used in China similarly to a signature or social security number in America.  With someone's chop (stamp) you can open and close bank accounts, buy property and complete most business or legal transactions.  It's akin to the King's seal used long ago.

Recently, a friend of ours gave Jeff and I new Chinese names.  With the help of my language tutor, Chloe and Ava have also received Chinese names and I have learned to write them all in chinese characters as well as understand most of the meanings.  Which means that we can now each get a chop and be real Taiwanese people. 

I'm not sure how to type Chinese characters on an English Language Keyboard so you can't see what they look like in Chinese.  But, here is what they are translated into English phonetics:

Jeff: Wei Jei-Fu (I think it means something like "great man." It was a little difficult to follow the meaning)
Heather: Wei Hai-Le (Sea of Happiness)
Chloe: Wei Ke-Yi (Happy and Comfortable)
Ava: Wei E-Wan (Hope for tender mercy)

Our last name is "Wei" and always come before the first name when saying both last and given names.  And of course, Chinese is a tonal language so you have to say our names with the proper tone or it won't mean anything near the same thing.

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