I met a Chinese guy on the train to Urumqi. We got to talking and he asked me my name. As the conversation continued he busied himself writing down a couple Chinese characters and then handed me a piece of paper. He explained the two characters on the paper was my Chinese name.

For a long time this piece of paper was just two Chinese characters to me with no real meaning. I had no idea how he had derived my Chinese name, nor the meaning of the characters.

Later, I came to learn that the Chinese will often put characters together that sound similar to the western pronunciation of a foreigner’s name; therefore, PETE is the verbal equivalent of the two characters Pi and Ti. When pronounced in Chinese the word(s) sound like Pete.

In the west it is more common to replace a difficult foreign name with a close approximation of a western name. In China it seemed more common to just figure out the closest word in Chinese that sound like your name and this word become your Chinese name. So I imagined many westerners found themselves being referred to as everyday objects like box, table, stone, bicycle, etc. Fortunately for me the meaning of the characters approximating my name were not altogether unsuitable. Though I wonder whether he intended to make a coat out of me:

Pi: Leather, skin; Ti: Special or unusual.