Moy Yan/Mei Xian/Mei Hsien

["S. L . Lee" <sllee@asiawind.com>]

Jean-Francois Ah-Chow,

You posted a lot of questions. The reason for so many Chinese Hakka with
"surnames" starting with "A" has been discussed in the Toronto Conference if
you were there. These were actually given names and Hakka and Cantonese
speaking people have a habit of adding the sound "ah" in front of the given
name when calling people. Surprisingly, I heard that some native American
tribes also have the same convention! This shows the ancient relationship of
the two cultures.

For instance Canadian Senator Vivienne Poy's husband was the descendant of
an immigrant named Ng Poy from Taishan, Guangdong. Ng is the surname and Poy
the given name. But the immigration officer wrote the given name Poy as the
surname since it is the 'last name' when you say it. And it has been used
since. Many overseas Chinese actually have this problem. You occassionally
still find the TV announcers say "President Zemin" when referring to Jiang
Zemin, which is not a polite way of addressing in Chinese. A professor in
Hong Kong has his ancestor's full name spelled as his last name. Obviously
the ancestor adopted an English name and retain the Chinese full name, but
then later the full name became the 'surname'.
This is why getting statistics of overseas Hakka and Chinese is so
difficult. You can't even go by the name to do a survey.

Moy-yan is the Hakka pronunciation, Meixian is the putonghua(Mandarin)
pronunciation, Mei-hsien is the old spelling for Meixian. They all refer the
same Hakka town.

We have discussed how to travel to Mexian in some earlier posts. You can
search to find the Meixian site and learn more.

SL Lee