Holiday season is the time to relax with families,
relatives, and friends. In this holiday
season, I have focused on teaching Chinese family and relative names (family
titles, not their giving names) to children.
We started with the words for family
and home, my family, I love my family,
mom, dad, older/younger sisters, older/younger
brothers, and I, myself.
For older children, we learned how to address extended family members
including father-side relatives and mother-side relatives and those by marriage.
In the traditional large Chinese family, a complex system
with rules and protocols was developed to keep the family’s well-being, with
each member having its own role and duty to fulfill. Therefore each member of such a large family
has its own unique family name (title).
When I teach these family names to children, they often
think it is too confusing. When I teach adults, they don’t like the idea that
maternal relatives are considered outsiders of the main family tree. Indeed, it
can be hard to remember all the names for different relatives based on relations.
By contrast I often feel that English family names are not
clear enough. When my husband introduced
his uncle to me at a family gathering, “This is Uncle Chuck,” I had no clue how
this Uncle Chuck related to him (he turned out to be my husband’s 三 姑 父 san
gu fu, i.e. father’s third older sister’s husband). When a friend of mine introduced me to his “sister-in-law”,
again I was confused. How did this woman
relate to him?
Chinese family structure has changed dramatically in the
last thirty years due to the one-child-per-family-policy. Nowadays, many Chinese families have one
child. Therefore it becomes a more top- heavy
tree: four grand-parents, two parents,
and one child.
With this new structure, family relationships also change. In the traditional way, a woman would use her
husband’s family name once married and children carried the family line by
having the father’s family name. Since
the 1950s, women have kept their maiden names even after getting married, but
children mostly carry their fathers’ family names. Now with one child, we hear stories of the
husband and wife fighting over which family name to give to their single child. I guess hyphenated family names haven’t taken
off in China yet.
Hope you enjoy the holidays with your families, relatives,
and friends!
