Name Game

In Korea, when a baby's born, the father's father names the child. There's a great deal of thought put into the name as it must derive from Chinese characters and the meaning of the name is believed to directly affect the child's personality and life path. For this reason, many people consult name experts to help with this difficult task.

My own brother, SangKwun, was given one name at birth, but was taken to a name expert and told his name was not good, so it was changed when he was about 3 or 4 to SangKwun.

As birth father was tasked with choosing a name for his first grandchild, he took this job very seriously. He met with a name expert because he was very concerned with finding a name that would be easily pronounced in both Chinese and Korean.

He came home with three pieces of paper with three different names to choose from. He passed them along to SangKwun and Emily.

I was chatting on IM with SangKwun and found out today that they chose a name!

My future niece's Korean name will be 김태연 (romanized, it's Kim Tae Yun). And her English name will be Claire Kim. (In Korean, the last name goes first.)

She's due to arrive August 20th. I can't express how excited I am to meet Baby Tae Yun/Claire!!!!