Some Chinese practices: 15 (Choosing names for children)

One traditional way of choosing names for their children is to use a set phrase, usually four characters, and always with good meanings.

    My mother's fellow private midwife friend and her husband chose:

文武全才

wén wǔ quán cái

"literary martial complete talent"

= to be talented in both the cultural skills and the military skills

    Btw, girls don't usually have a place in this system, or they'll have their own strand, often featuring characters that mean beautiful, elegant, virtuous, gentle or something similarly feminine.  (Yes, gender roles are clearly defined -- see https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/12/some-chinese-practices-13-gender-roles.html) 

    Daughters were traditionally seen as "borrowed" items, because they'll get married at some point and then they will belong to that new family.  (See blog about the status of daughters who have married:  嫁出去的女兒潑出去的水 / 嫁出去的女儿泼出去的水 https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/12/chinese-sayings-48_19.html.)

    One traditional view of female children is that they're a drain on the family purse.  A girl's biological family are spending money on her for nothing as she'll then leave them and join the husband's family, taking on the housework (in farming families, also the work in the fields), and bearing the male offspring for carrying on the family name.

    Back to my mother's friend:  she did have four boys, so their personal (vs generational) names had, in turn, 文武全才.  There was one girl, who was not included in this system.

    Some ten years or so later, another boy came along unexpectedly, so they had to scramble a fifth character for his name, but of course, it was outside the set phrase of 文武全才, which rather upsets the marching pace: 文武全才, then 智 (zhì / wise,wisdom) on its own.

    I wonder how many times parents have been wrong-footed in this practice, because, as we can see from the example above, children don't come in neat sets.

(Singapore, 1950s–1960s)