Posted by Patrick Zein on October 17, 2001 at 06:02:48:
In Reply to: Why do people from China have only 2 names? posted by lee on September 25, 2001 at 18:11:59:
Actually, most Chinese have names consisting of THREE syllables/characters -- The first being the family name and the two following being their personal name. A few family names consist of two characters and some people have personal names consisting of only one syllable/character.
However it's rather difficult to find a nice name consisting of only one character for the family name and one character for the personal name, so such names are considered to be especially fine and a sign of educated parents.
My Chinese name is "Cai Zhongchen" (where "Cai" is corresponding to my family name "Zein"). This could actually be abbreviated to "Cai Zhong", but I feel that this would be to nice and classical a name for a regular Westerner like me.