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Note on Transliteration of Names Chinese names have been problematic for American historians because there has been no standard method of transliterating the Chinese characters. Emma Woo Louie tried to unravel aspects of the problem in her book, Chinese American Names: Tradition and Transition.1 In the nineteenth century American scholars adopted the British Wade-Giles system of transliteration of Chinese characters for place names and for names of people with last name, then first name hyphenated if there were two characters, thus “Wang Shou-jing” was a typical rendition. The Hanyu pinyin (abbreviated pinyin) system, adopted by the People’s Republic of China and in 1979, by the United States, rendered the same name “Wang Shoujing,” eliminating the hyphenated first name. The transliteration system made other changes but the result was a uniform and phonetically correct rendition of the Chinese characters. The international postal system adopted a variety of spellings for place names; this was further complicated by the problem of having different names for the same place: for example, Peking (“northern capital”) became Peiping (“northern peace”) when China’s capital was moved, and later transliterated Beijing (“northern capital”) when the pinyin system was adopted. Kwangtung (postal system) became Guangdong (a more phonetic way of transliterating the name of the province in south China from where most nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants originated), and Fukien became Fujian. The Four Counties /Districts of Guangdong province is Siyi instead of Ssu-yi (Wade-Giles) or Sze Yup (Cantonese) and Zhongshan (name changed in honor of Sun Yatsen’s style name) is used instead of Chung-shan (Wade-Giles) or Heungshan (Cantonese original name of Sun Yatsen’s birthplace and name of district in the late nineteenth century). Pinyin is used to transliterate place names in this study. American immigration officials and census takers adopted a random method of transliterating Chinese names. In nineteenth-century Guangdong province, a person had a family name that was usually monosyllabic but in rare instances two syllables, such as Si-ma (often transliterated Ssuma) and Ou-yang (often transliterated Owyang, Oyang, Auyang). The family name (xing) or the clan name (shi) was followed by the first name that consisted of one or two characters. In numerous cases, the second character of the first name was recorded as one’s last name because American officials did not i-xxxiv_1-246_Chun.indd 29 6/24/11 8:35 AM understand the order in which Chinese names are given—therefore Zhao Jinhui (immigration spelling, Chow Gin Huey) became Mr. Zhaojin Hui and all of his children and grandchildren were given the surname of Hui (Huey, their American surname). When another Mr. Chow followed his older brother through the immigration line, he told the official that he was Chow Erh (Chow Number Two) and his last name, and those of his American born descendants, then became Jower. Some, like Shirley Hune, ended up with a family name that does not resemble her Chinese family name. Few Chinese bothered to change their family name legally to the correct spelling, although most second-generation Chinese Americans knew their correct family name. The transliteration of any part of the Chinese name was done randomly so that the difficult-to-pronounce family name of Ng (Wu in pinyin) could be written Ung, Ing, and Eng, to give a few examples. Dialectic differences in spoken Chinese also led to different spellings of the same family names so that Zhang (pinyin) became Chung, Cheung, and Jung on immigration papers. Transcribing the names varied according to what the official heard as he tried to spell out the name. There are one hundred common Chinese family names, but some Chinese family names in the United States were not among them and were actually “invented” by the American government official or Chinese individual. Kee was not a surname but Kee as a last name can be found in many census manuscripts. Chung Kee (1847–1909) of Hawthorne, Nevada, was born Zhang (family name in pinyin) Gee Wen (Cantonese) in Kaiping, Guangdong province, China; all of his descendants have the surname of Kee. Chinese merchants often were known by their company name rather than their personal name., For example, Kam Wah Chung, the name of the store in John Day, Oregon, became the name of the individual as far as the EuroAmerican population was concerned. In a similar manner, Non Chong Yee of Carson City was better known by his store’s name, Quong Hing (also spelled Kwong Hing and other...

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