My dear fellow forumosan, advise please???
To those of you who are married to Taiwanese girls: How did you figure out the family names for your children in the Chinese language? How did you translate your own family names into a local one, if you did at all? (I am assuming your children take your names not your Taiwanese wives’?)
My husband’s family name is LINTERN… :help:
Any suggestions?
[quote=“Bellith”]My dear fellow forumosan, advise please???
To those of you who are married to Taiwanese girls, how did you figure out the family names for your children in the Chinese language? How did you translate your own family names into a local one? (I am assuming your children take your names not your Taiwanese wives’?)
My husband’s family name is LINTERN… :help:
Any suggestions?[/quote]
My two sons use their mother’s family name.
Their English names and Chinese names are totally unrelated. Why should they be related?
By law, the children’s names are taken from the Chinese name of the father, even if it’s gibberish, the mother isn’t even considered. Many foreign man who marry a Taiwanese woman take her name, then at least the children have a family name that means something.
Thanks Durins Bane and Big Fluufy Matthew! 
I suppose you are right. The English and Chinese names don’t have to be related…
I don’t think I’d consider letting our child take mine though, just because I’m not that fond of it myself! (It’s TSAI, which has the same pronounciation as ‘vegetable’ 
)
Hyphenation…its all the rage now.
YoungCowboy “Chinese-HillBilly”
But he usually goes by his Momma’s Chinese name.
There are exceptions to that rule.
If you really must get a Chinese name that’s related to LINTERN, how about Lin (林)?
I can’t believe I’m advising a Taiwanese person on selecting a Chinese name for somebody. 
When I got married, I took my wife’s family name, Yang. That made certain forms easier to fill out so things got processed more easily. So our son has his wife’s family name in Chinese and my family name in English.
The family usually goes to the fortune teller (tsuanming xiansheng) after the child is born to get him to find an auspicious given name. Instead of that, I insisted that my wife’s family think of one and they looked in lots of dictionaries until they came up with something that was close in Chinese to his given English name and yet had a positive meaning in Chinese.
I’m glad I insisted on that because he now has a special name that they (not some fortune-telling stranger) picked out. Try it out and I’m sure you’ll be satisfied.
not long ago, they were talking about changing that idiotic law so that kids can have their mothers’ surname. has that progressed at all?
it’s too late for us, but what a sham it’s been to this point …
Mmm, i do know about having a stranger, in this case a fortune teller, pick out a name for you. I’m adament that’s how I acquired my ‘delightful’ name! A very very silly Taiwanese thing to do… 
Did think about Lin for LINTERN…
Thanks guys! Much appreciated!
My wife and I agreed to let her pick the Chinese name and me to pick the English name. Her family is pretty big into the fortune telling thing so they agreed not to tell me where the name came from. The way I feel about all this fortune telling and witchcraft is the less I know the better off and less stressed I will be. I know what the characters in my daughter’s name mean but refuse to ask who came up with it.
I also took my wife’s name as because my surname had three syllables and I thought it would be less of a burden to my daughter. The problem with this though is that if the child has the mother’s name it will cause others to wonder whether or not there is a father. I didn’t think of this until my 10 year old students pointed it out.
Keep in mind that some of the people who are giving you advice here have children who are not ROC nationals. You have a lot more flexibility with what you name your kid when your kid doesn’t have a local identity. 
Hey! I’m surnamed Tsai in Chinese and it’s a great surname!! (Especially now that I’ve married and my husband’s Chinese surname would be “hua”, making me “hua cai”… 
well, it’s better than “cai hua” at least!!
i use my wife’s surname in taiwan… hence our daughter does too…
dunno which i will use if i ever move back to aus… my surname was the target of a lot of jeering in the younger years… something i don’t need to put my daughter through…
i’m going to take an opposing view here… kids use my name, it’s mine and it means something. if it were a (totally lol) opposite situation and you were in the states the kids would have the chinese family name.
Remember, if your kids are ROC nationals, it’s not a question of choice. They HAVE to take dad’s surname (Chinese-ified, of course - the ROC doesn’t recognize English/non-Chinese names unless you’re an aboriginal).
The main exception to the rule is that the Taiwanese wife must have no brothers, only sisters. We qualify on this basis (wife has 4 sisters) so our sons have her name. That name can be used as-is either here or in the West, whereas my Chinese surname is different from my real surname. Having two surnames is basically I think silly… if I were an expat in Germany I wouldn’t be calling myself Schmidt… we only have to do it here because of the phonological constraints of Mandarin, and because of the Chinese writing system. It doesn’t bother me too much because I don’t think of myself as Shi in any real way, but for bicultural kids I think there are already enough identity issues to deal with, without lumbering them with two surnames.
ironlady, that was hilarious! :bravo: :bravo: :bravo:
I share your sentiment, smithsgj re having two surnames.
I wonder what govenment agency would advise?
We actually went with related names, Emma and Ai Ma, because for me it made sense that her grandparents from both countries would call her by the same name.
As to surname she got mine Luo, Father in law got to choose which characters were used for Ai Ma so that he could get the stroke number right for the lucky/heavy something or other.
This all sounded very logical and fair until one of my wife’s friends pointed out that Emma’s name in Taiwanese sounds exactly like driver (as in golf club) Luo Lai Ba.
The moral of the story is no matter how careful you’ll probably end up messing up somewhere, so do whatever the heck makes you and your partner happy!
[quote=“Big Fluffy Matthew”]By law, the children’s names are taken from the Chinese name of the father, even if it’s gibberish, the mother isn’t even considered. Many foreign man who marry a Taiwanese woman take her name, then at least the children have a family name that means something.[/quote]As others have done, just change your Chinese name to your wife’s Chinese surname register your child’s name, then change back your Chinese name to whatever you want later.