Goudan Tanna
What up, dawg?
AFTER a thousand years, the ridicule and barking provoked by the mention of their surname finally proved too much for families from a village in central China. They won permission this month to change their name legally from Gou, a word that means “humble” but is pronounced the same as “dog”.
“Some people just bark at me when they see me,” a villager from Tangzhuang township in central Henan province said.
Not any more. The villagers have reversed a decision imposed on them by a 10th-century emperor and have recovered their ancient family name of Jing, which means “respect”. Their centuries of shame began with an ancestor who was a minister to Emperor Shi Jingtang in the chaotic Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period and shared his master’s name — Jing. To curry favour, Minister Jing changed his surname to one virtually unused in China. But his heirs found that their lives had gone to the dogs.
Villager Jing Hulin, 60, had been known all his life as Gou Hulin. He said: “Gou sounds terrible. People always make fun of us, calling us dog. Children are afraid to go to school because they’ll be laughed at. And, anyway, our ancestor’s name was Jing and we wanted to go back to that.”
It’s interesting because, as I blogged before, naming your kids after disgusting things is a way of preventing evil spirits from harming them.
Another colorful naming tradition was the giving of grotesque monickers to very young children, in the hopes that evil spirits would be dissuaded from harming them. After all, what self-respecting demon would pray on a child named “Dog Turd” (Goudan)? In rural families, fathers would rush outside immediately after the birth of a son, and name the child after the first unpleasant thing they saw. Hence such names as Suozho ("tying post") or Gousheng ("dog’s leftovers") which, if the children were unlucky, could stick with them well into adulthood. This tradition lingered on in rural areas until after the founding of the PRC.
(Let’s see how long it takes for someone to get the title of this post.)
