Batgung

Hi, stumbled on this forum by chance today so hope someone can help me!

My wife and I are expecting our first child in a few months, we live in the UK and I am BBC (parents live here) whilst she was brought up in HK (where her parents still live). The problem is that my parents (dad...) are heavily traditional Cantonese-chinese, whereas hers are not at all (they are from Beijing/Shanghai originally). Read more »

When I first arrived in Hong Kong I'd regularly make mistakes with peoples' Chinese names. Here's the Batgung primer to help you do better ...

If having a baby is difficult, sometimes choosing their name seems even harder. And when you've got two cultures & languages in the mix, things get even more complicated.

Choosing the English names for our two daughters has been my job, with MrsB holding the power of veto. The first time around, before we knew the baby's sex, I was suggesting "Huw" if it was a boy. It's a friend's name, and has a link to Wales where I'm from. "No!" says MrsB, "any Chinese person that hears you call his name will think you're swearing at him". Lucky it was a girl...

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