I sometimes get asked about my Chinese name. It's a little strange, I know, but there is a reason for it, but not necessarily a reason for it being strange.
My full English name is Charles Matthew Clark; my Chinese name is 文夫禮 (Wen Fu Li if you are not able to read Chinese). I use my Chinese name more when signing my name or for applying for things; most people around here who don't speak English call me 恰克, which is a Chinese pronunciation of the name I usually go by, Chuck.
So where did 文夫禮 come from? I decided I needed a Chinese name -- and I turned out to be correct for thinking so -- a few months after coming to Taiwan. I didn't like how my name sounded when converted into a Chinese pronunciation so I wanted to go with a traditional three-character Chinese name. (Most Chinese people have names of three characters, but some have two characters and some have four.) The question was what to use. As I said, I didn't like the sound of my name in Chinese -- and it was too long that way anyways -- so I decided to take the meaning of my name and convert it to Chinese. So...
Charles means "manly, farmer". (I just did a search for the meaning of 'Charles' to double check and discovered the origin of 'Charles' is actually German!) Therefore, 夫 which means "a man" or "a male adult" (It also means "master"!) Matthew means "God's gift", so 禮 which means "gift".
Clark was harder. One of the problems is that there are only a few family names in Taiwan, they don't have the variety we have in Western countries. As a result, it is very common for people to have the same family name as somebody else. Another problem is that at the time I was choosing a Chinese name, I couldn't write Chinese that well, so I needed a character that was easy to write. So...
Clark comes from 'clerk', which means my ancestors were literate. Looking at a list of Chinese family names I found 文 which has to do with language and writing and, more importantly, was very easy to write. So I picked that. But then I discovered that very, very few people have that as a family name. In fact, most people I know can't think of anyone in Taiwan with that name! (But now there is one Taiwanese person with that name: My son's Chinese name is 文.)
With Chinese names the family name goes first (which is why I keep saying "family name" rather than "last name"), so I then moved 文 to the beginning and came up with 文夫禮.
There. Now you know.
