Chao

[jodawi]

Copying this to my journal from here because I just got asked about it and it took too long for me to find it.

Once upon a time i got married. This presented a problem. I didn't want her to take my name, because that's rooted in sexist property transfer. She didn't want me to take her name, because that would feel like to her that she was married to her brother, and she wasn't too keen on the thought of sex and marriage with a brother. We didn't want to hyphenate because if we had kids and they got married, would they be Skye Michaela Bertels-Williams-Aarstol-Mittelschmertz? The name would soon grow so long that it would stretch around the universe twice.

So we needed a new name.

So it was Chao. Reasons:

• The Sacred Chao (see there's a point in me typing here), which we pronounced Cow of course
• Far Side cow cartoons
• I was studying physics, and was considering doing chaos theory in graduate school
• Because we were chaotic
• Because it would be amusing for us to be mistaken for Chinese people (particularly in grad school when i wound up being on an otherwise all-Chinese research group so all of our names appeared together on the paper). Sometimes we would get babble on the phone trying to offer us special rates on calls to China. Never really got any racism directed against us as far as i know...
• It had a pleasing look: Chao
• I was studying Buddhism at the time, and there was an Empress Wu Chao who was a Chinese patron of Buddhism, and i had taken to calling fiancée unit "The Empress Sun Wu Chao"
• ...?

Some negatives: my grandfather thought i was trying to disown his name, nobody could pronounce it properly, it always had to be spelled into the phone, and John Chao is still getting the same junk mail that i'm getting.

My login name at work is still Chao, and my programmer constant is kChao, and my public folder is named Chao, so i can still spread mild amounts of chaos around. And i can blame any old bad code of mine on that John Chao guy and express gladness that we got rid of him.

This concludes this moment of explicatorialness.