It’s funny how perceptions work differently in different languages. If you’re below a certain age, the most famous Chinese name after Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung if you’re even older) is probably Chun Li, the cute fighting vixen from Street Fighter II who shouts “Yatta!” (“I did it!”) after she wins a fight. While the brains of English speakers labor over properly memorizing a strange-sounding name like Chun Li, which has no mental hooks for us to attach it with, Japanese have the benefit of being able to internalize the name using kanji characters. Because kanji names have meaning, Japanese might get the impression that Chun Li was a beautiful baby born in the spring, since the characters mean “Spring Beauty.” We have a house in the Tierrasanta area of San Diego, and just for fun I asked my Japanese daughter what she thought the name might mean. Her answer was really cute: “It means Santa Claus wearing a tiara crown.”
“Tierrasanta” made my daughter think of Santa-san wearing a tiara.
