My Korean Name
May 19, 2007 @ 8:29 am | Listen to this post
It’s really early in the morning here, but I went to study after work today and drank like two grande Tazo Chai Lattes to get a boast. Well, 5 hours later, I’m still wide awake. This will allow me to write about a couple cool things that happened last weekend.
Instead of having individual holidays for each parent, ie. Mother’s Day, Koreans have a day called “Parents Day” which is on May 8th. Typical presents from the children are usually carnations and/or money. Jeong-in asked me to come with her to meet her parents, grandmother, and sister’s family to celebrate Parents Day with them. Before Saturday, I had yet to meet her sister (Jeong-su), brother-in-law (Yu-shin), or her 5 year old nephew (Jin-hyeok) so I was excited to meet them. They were really nice and kind to me. Jin-hyeok, was a cute kid who really liked me after I gave him a mini-soccer ball for another holiday, Children’s Day. We had great food at a buffet style restaurant and when Jeong-in’s father and uncle came late, all the men drank soju, including me of course. Her dad has been so nice to me ever since I first met him. Actually, there was a little drama about it on Saturday when her father seemed a little more favorable to me, than Yu-shin. I think it’s just a little teasing and I think it’s unfair because Yu-shin has a lot of responsibility as he is married to their oldest daughter and had their first grandchild who is a boy. Something else that took place that night was one of the best things of all. Jeong-su asked me if I had a Korean name, since using my real name while speaking Korean is odd, and I said that I’ve thought about one, but never found a good match. After a couple seconds she thought of the best Korean name for me. The way it would be romanized to English is “Ma” taken from the first sound in Meagher and “Geon-woo”, which is very similar to Conor as a given name. But family names go first, so it would be written or spoken like this: Ma Geon-woo. It would be a lot easier to explain if everybody could read Korean writing, but I did my best. I can show you that my name is not legal or anything, but somewhat official as I got my registered name change on cyworld.com, a Korean website that has 40 percent of the country’s total 49 million population registered.
