My New Name: 尚娜 (ShangNa)

I have finally settled on characters for my Chinese name. Most people do this within their first few weeks of arriving in China. But I was lucky, or unlucky... My name is easy for Chinese people to say. Most of them probably assumed my name was my Chinese name. My closest friends here call me NaNa, a nickname based on what they assumed to be my Chinese given name.

So here it is: 尚娜 (ShangNa) For those of you who know about tones, Shang is 1st tone, Na is 4th tone.

I decided to use Shang instead of Shan because I wanted to keep the "aw" sound. Shan is flat. The only cool thing about Shan is I could've used the character for mountain. If you type the pinyin "shang" into Word, you get a choice of 11 characters. The first one I popped into a translator was 尚 because it's easy to write, haha. It means "to value." How rad is that!? So my search stopped there. My Chinese family name is now Shang. The Chinese list their family names before their given names.

Na is a common given name. I'm watching LiNa play in the French Open right now. Although, you probably call her NaLi in your part of the world (I'm assuming most of you live in N.A.). The character 娜 means graceful and elegant. I know those words don't actually describe meeee, but I like the character. The first part (女) is the character for female, and that I am =)

There you have it. I have a new name, although it sounds quite a bit like the one Momma and Pappason gave me.

Love and light,
尚娜