La Jornada: From Peter Pan to Bob Dylan: Western names gain ground in China

Guangzhou. Bob Dylan has a business in mind and you seem like a means to achieve it. After an exhibition of delivery drones, you find yourself in the middle of an exhibition center where vehicles and other technologies are deployed for the development of what is called the low-altitude economy, a concept that refers to the exchange of goods and services using airspace below a thousand meters.

Dylan introduces himself and it seems that his interest in you and your group of colleagues grows when he knows that they are from Latin America; He gets on the same bus as you, scans your WeChat contact – an application similar to WhatsApp, but with many more integrated services, such as QR payment – ​​and tells you a little more about his professional career and the business he has in mind.

Bob Dylan wants to sell generating sets in Latin America. He has already done it in Brazil, and sees in you and your colleagues a potential channel to obtain contacts and/or partners in Mexico, Peru and Chile. You know it’s impossible, but you listen to him without completely breaking his expectations. It tells you a little more about its ambition to place in new markets those devices capable of generating electrical energy from an internal combustion engine and that are useful in sectors where any pause in supply is unacceptable, such as mines, data centers or hospitals.

Until now you don’t know the most important thing about who is looking for a deal with you. He shows you his business card. “Bob Dylan” heads the small rectangle of paper. Now there is a need to find a conductive channel between the American musician and this Chinese public relations specialist. That’s where you can’t help but ask, not about the generators or the business he has in mind, but about that newly revealed identity: “How did you come up with this name, Bob Dylan?”

Like many Chinese who – while learning another language, studying at university or entering the job market – take on a “Western” name to facilitate communication with foreigners, Doutianhui (written in piyin, the phonetic transcription system for Chinese characters) took his name because the sound of “Dylan” seemed close to his birth name and “Bob” seemed like a complement to him.

Scarcely as nice is the name of an engineer who answers questions from reporters about megadrones that have a cabin to transport passengers and are presented to the market as autonomous taxis. At the end of a series of questions, he hands over his card and every nod between his work and his identity is condensed into “Peter Pan, senior marketing manager of Pilotless Air Taxi Company Ehang.”

Although the choice of a Chinese name breaks the minds of parents who want to condense the destiny for their children in it – like Haoyu, “vast/immense universe”; Ruize, “auspicious blessing”; Yichen, “great and heavenly”; Muyao “bathed by precious jade”, or Xinyi “joyful and content” – in just a couple of characters after the surname, the adoption of a nickname in another language is left more to the inventiveness of its bearers.

Some do not change their Chinese name to communicate in another language because the pronunciation is not really complicated for an English or Spanish speaker; others are more orthodox, like a Star; others to a phonetic simile to her Chinese name, like an Agnes; There are also those who go for a personal, literary, historical or musical hero, and others could be Huning in Chinese, Victor in English and Brillo in Spanish.