Taky said that he can make two different menus, one in English and one in Chinese. I thought this would be great for my family. He can also put two different audio tracks, so for the Chinese track, he can have traditional Chinese celebration music. My mom and I thought that my grandpa would really enjoy that.
Anyhow, for the Chinese menu, Taky said that if it was possible, to provide our names in Chinese. I thought that would be really difficult as Yubo isn't Chinese. However, I finally realized I could just search for the kanji of his name.
So I found 豊 as the kanji for "Yutaka." I have no idea how he got the impression that his name translates to "ghost eggplant," but it really means "abundance" or "plentiful" or other similar words. I have no idea how I could possibly translate his surname, so I think I won't. I think it's sufficient to just have our first names.
My name, 美玲, is so boring to me. I feel like it's got to be the most popular Chinese girl name ever. In Mandarin, it's pronounced "Mei ling." In Cantonese (or at least how my family says it), we spell it Meyloeng, pronounced 'mei lung.' It means "pretty bell." There's a lady at our church that has this name. I haven't brought it up to her though. Her last name is Japanese though, so I don't know if she's mixed or if she just married Japanese.
Apparently, my dad named my sister and me incorrectly. As far as I know, the first character is the name and the second character is different amongst siblings. In our case, the second character is the same. My sister's name means "happy bell."
Anyway, enough of that. I was just happy to have found Yubo's name in kanji and its actual meaning.
*Random note: I just found out that my last name 任 is the same as the kanji for "nin" in Nintendo. Aside from that, it means duty/responsibility/obligation. I didn't know my last name had such a heavy meaning.
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So Yubo went ahead and let me know that the "ghost eggplant" thing came from "Yubo," which neither of us have been able to find again. I think he's crazy.
He also let me know that the kanji that I found for his name is not the one they showed him when he went to Japan. It doesn't help that no one told him the meaning of his name, so I can't find it that way. He doesn't even know if anyone in his family would know what characters were used for his name. He was told it was just a mash up of the names of his two uncles, so I guess in that case, there isn't a meaning.
Back to searching for me then.
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Oh, Wikipedia, how I love you. I found this:
Possible writings
Yutaka can be written using different kanji characters and can mean:
- 豊, "rich"
- 裕, "affluence"
- 優, "tenderness"
- 寛, "relaxation"
- 穣, "fertile"
- 温, "warmth"
Yubo's crazy. I was right the first time. He told me they gave him a stamp with the character on it, so we went through what he had kept from his trip to Japan. I thought that if they gave him a stamp, he must have used it somewhere. And he did! And we found that the character they gave him was the first one I thought it was: 豊
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