Call Me Bruce
The name “Lee” is one of the most common family names in China. It’s spelled Li (or lǐ in Pinyin) and means “plum.” Here’s its character.
This character is a compound of two other characters. The first is mù which means “tree” or “wood.”
The second is zǐ, which means “child.”
In Chinese, horizontal lines at the top of the character usually mean something like “sky” or “heaven” and lines at the bottom mean “ground” or “earth.” Thus the placement of the tree character over the child character implies a child sitting under a tree. So that’s me, a child under a tree. And this somehow means “plum.”
While I find this fascinating to learn, the earthy, hippie imagery this conjures up in my head really disturbs me. Goddamned hippies, they ruin everything.
Update: Just to add one more layer of confusion to this, even though the name Li means “plum,” if you actually want to refer to a plum, like if you were asking to buy one, you would have to put another character at the end. That character is zǐ, child. So the characters for plum are as follows.
Now, the use of the character zǐ is not specific to the word “plum.” The word for one type of dumpling is bao zi, for example. Christ this language is confusing.
