I have not been a faithful blog fan lately and just realized you switched sites. I have now bookmarked this one and am glad to have read such a fabulous entry first. I also meandered around a bit to see some fabulous Kate-photos!

The site looks great. Very “you.”

And I still can’t believe you’re going to China so soon!

And yes, eventually I hope to be better at coming up with Chinese names — the problem right now is that I only know so few Chinese names as examples! I hope that after teaching tons of students in China I’ll get more of a knack for it, certainly not to the level of Chinese speakers (even native speakers typically consult with a few friends or respected colleagues before settling on a name) but hopefully good enough to give my future students names!

Thank you Rose for the suggestion/explanation of my name. I’m curious to see what you’ll come up with for the second character.

Regarding Kelsey’s name: if I didn’t like you, I’d name you 可惜 (kěxī), which sounds like Kelsey but means “what a shame!” That was the first thing that came to my mind — because of the sound though, not because of you!

It looks like “Kelsey” actually means brave or bold, so I would incorporate the character 勇/yòng or 胆/dǎn in it, not only because I think it’s neat to carry over the meaning of one’s name, but also because I think it really suits you. Both of these are found primarily in boys’ names (this is not a feminine trait), but I think you could handle that. One of the scholars this semester, a sweet man, had a character in his name that’s normally in girls’ names, and a female Korean student I knew had a name with “research” or something intellectually-masculine in it, so I think this isn’t totally taboo, and since you’re an American anyway you could get away with it.

I’d have to think about the rest of it though. There’s the surname, which for an American can just be picked from a list of the most common surnames (there are only 300 or so total, and most of the population uses the top 50 or 100 or something). Then there’s the other character in your given name, which could be just about anything: it could be something more feminine to balance out the masculine “brave/bold” character (red, swallow, beautiful, a type of flower, jade, etc), or it could be 喜/xǐ which means “happy” and rhymes with your first name, or it could be some other characteristic.