long and Kuang Quan Antoine Lee and Lee
these Chinese American last names may
have different spellings but they're
actually the same take my family for
example my great aunts and uncles spelt
their last name le e but my parents felt
Li let me explain first remember that
Chinese has hundreds of dialogue
variations that all sound pretty
different for example let's see in
Chinese can be my Tappan maxify Oh with
my back and that's just three dialects
so what happens in a country where
everyone is speaking a variation of a
language and not everyone understands
each other chaos well sort of back in
the day when Beijing was so known as pay
Qing China hadn't yet fully adopted
Mandarin as its official language in the
1940s most government officials use
Mandarin but many other dialects were
also alive and well no because there was
no one dialect that everyone used there
was also no agreement on how to
translate Chinese characters into Roman
alphabet for Westerners to pronounce a
couple of British Jews did create a
phonetic alphabet to understand Mandarin
called the wait jowl system who was
never officially recognized in the
country as a result the earliest Chinese
immigrants see United States wrote their
last names based on the dialect they
spoke say Kwan if you spoke Cantonese or
Guan if you spoke Mandarin but then
Malcolm to power and he strengthened
Mandarin as the National dialect making
it the standard language of Education
for all of China so went to the Anchises
a woman Tony you saw with him ha he then
got one of his own guys to create a
phonetic alphabet and that became known
as Han Yu Qing yi
once China had an official alphabet for
spelling pay King became Beijing Nanking
became Nanjing Cantone became Guangzhou
the city's actual names and Chinese did
not change just the Western spelling by
the way China is sired Taiwan still uses
a mix of wage Isles in penang spelling
while Hong Kong still speaks Cantonese
and uses Cantonese spelling all this
brings us back to Chinese names in the
US based on the spelling of those names
it gives you a clue about the origin of
the family like the leaves who emigrated
from China before 1958 they spelled
their last name le II but my parents who
immigrated from China after the peony
alphabet they spell their last name Li
same goes for many others such as lamin
Lin Chao and Zhou Qing and Wu
same family different spelling and now
you know