In traditional Chinese names, the zìbèi (or "generation name") is shared amongst the siblings of the same generation. My sister's Chinese name is Yii Lun – we share the character 倫 as our zìbèi.
In ancient China, it was traditional to take the zìbèi from a generation poem, specific to your family lineage. Each successive character of the poem becomes the zìbèi for the next generation.
When I was younger, my mother taught me and my sister our generation poem. We practised the unfamiliar tones together until it was seared into our brains.
The poem is in Hokkien, a Chinese dialect:
Gao ning mo
sam ling ning ning ding ding
san tap tsu.
This poem is a precious treasure – something that remembers and honors my ancestors, something that connects me to my culture and shows that I have a place in it, something to bring forward to the next generation.
Several years later, I asked my parents for the Mandarin translation.
"Why?"
"Because I want to know what the next generation name will be."
"What are you talking about?"
It turns out that the poem had absolutely nothing to do with generation names and is instead a conversation my mom randomly overheard when she was little, and never forgot, which started with someone asking a girl, "Do you have a cat?”
In Mandarin, cat is 猫 (māo) – which is a homophone for the word for fur or hair, 毛 (máo). The girl, not confident in her Mandarin, shyly replied in Hokkien. Here’s her poetic response translated into English:
Last year, nothing
But suddenly, out of the blue
Three sprouts appeared!
…and so it turns out that what I thought was my generation poem was actually just an overheard conversation about pubic hair.