My official name, Heung-Wah, literally means "towards the birch." It is not a common name, not for a girl anyways. In 7th grade, my ESL teacher asked us to write an essay on how we got our names. So I asked my mother, and she gave me this lame answer. There is a Chinese idiom, yan yan heung wing, which basically means prosperity. So naturally my parents chose the name Yan Heung Wing (in Chinese the surname goes before the given name) for my brother. Poor Bryce! Anyways, it is customary in Chinese for siblings to use the same first character in their given names, so I was stuck with the character heung, which means "facing; toward." Poor me! While my parents puzzled over which second character they should use to make my name sound more feminine (and less likely to get me into trouble with the kids in school), my grandfather came up with the brilliant idea (I'm being sarcastic here, in case you don't know) that since a birch tree is so useful, why don't they use the character wah (which means birch in Chinese)? So that's how the characters Heung Wah ended up on my birth certificate.

Later I asked Mom what are birch trees used for; she could only come up with one answer, and it was that the bark of a birch tree is used to make candles.

When I was studying abroad in Japan, my Japanese teacher asked us to introduce ourselves (in Japanese of course). I was kind of getting bored with my name story (besides the point that it was beyond my Japanese speaking ability), so I came up with a different story. As you know, Japanese kanji originated from Chinese characters. The character wah is pronounced kaba in Japanese reading. Since many Japanese women have names that end in ko, I joked that if I were to choose a Japanese name (as I did with Helena, my American name), it would be kabako. There was dead silence save for my Japanese teacher's chuckle. So I explained my little problem: the homonym of kaba means hippopotamus, so I would've named myself "little hippo." I thought it was a good pun though, in my weird sense of humor.

In case you're still reading because your work is more boring than this boring story, yes, I did choose "Helena" as my "nickname" so to speak. Why I chose an alternative name was because I was sick of people mispronouncing heung and then making fun of it. As you might have noticed, "Helena" begins with the same alpabet as "Heung." In addition, "Helena" means "light" (in Greek?) -- you see the connection? Candles...light...

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