Writing Tips - Chinese Names!
If you want to read this elsewhere, read this on medium or go check out my IG at @annessarose_writes! On that account, I’m writing book reviews of AAPI fiction, posting quotes, and I’m hoping to post more tips and tricks to boost Chinese representation in fiction.
Okie. I see a lot of posts with “name suggestions” going around, and they’re pretty neat! But they’re also almost exclusively Eurocentric and I rarely come across one that includes any non-white names.
Which, well, I do admit they’re helpful. But also, when it’s the only thing that keeps showing up, that’s not very good. When I tried my hand at creative writing when I was 7/8/9 years old, those were the only lists I ever saw online.
I’m Chinese. I tried to give my ocs a Chinese name. I took a look at those lists, and saw not one non-Eurocentric name. So I turned all my ocs white as a small beginning writer because as a child, I didn’t know better, and I thought names like mine were weird and that white was the only normal.
And… jeez. If writers can’t even get our names right - if they can’t even look at our names without going “that’s weird/out of place” - well, no wonder we’re so alienated. Look. We’re human. We’re here. We belong in this world and we deserve to be seen in fiction, too.
So here’s a list of Chinese family names. To my sci-fi writer friends or to my fantasy-writer friends who wish to draw from eastern cultures to inspire their worlds, if you wish to do so, go right ahead! But do it respectfully and don’t appropriate/completely whitewash it (see: how George Lucas did a lot of his stuff in Star Wars…)
They’ll be formatted [Mando]/[canto]. This is not a comprehensive list by any means. This is just a quick shortlist with some of the most popular family names so you can use this for your Chinese characters.
vaporwave
blakekathryn
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
janainaart
