Jin

You might remember that I was kind of handed a Chinese name on my first day in Taiwan. I'd come in with my grandmother's name (Kim Ling Wei) and came out with a different character for Wei, and a Jin-Nee. Considering that all of the other non-Chinese speaking Fulbrighters were assigned names that sounded like their American names and surnames, I kind of let go of my grandma's name and surrendered.

But actually, I found out last weekend that there's a lot more to "jin" than sounding like "jen." "Jin," seen below, is the character for gold (quite auspicious), but it's also pronounced "Kim" in Cantonese. So I did get my grandmother's name after all, through some cosmic blessing that my English name sounds like her character in Mandarin. I kind of got teared up because it didn't hit me how much it meant to me until I was so relieved that it had happened after all.