Nicholas Moey Research Paper

Nicholas Moey. Ashley Scott Moey. Nicole Moey. These were all possibilities that never made the cut. Still a blob in my mother’s belly, they didn’t know yet whether I was a boy or a girl. My mother had this book filled with baby names and would randomly flip through until she found one that sounded “right” to her. The name “Nicholas” seemed to roll off her tongue just fine. A quick trip to the doctor’s office to find out the sex of the baby revealed that I was a girl pretty early on. Nicholas Moey was out of the question. My mother soon came to love the name “Ashley Scott”. “Ashley” for its feminine connotation and “Scott” for its masculine connotation. It was the right balance for a well-rounded individual. But that idea was soon scrapped when my father tried to pronounce “Ashley” and it came out as “Asli”. Not necessarily a name Cantonese-speakers can enunciate. My father then proposed the name “Nicole”
The fun thing about being Chinese is that I have two Chinese names, a Cantonese one and a Mandarin one. They are the same name, just said two different ways. Chosen by my maternal grandmother, my Chinese name is 梅雅雯. In Cantonese it is pronounced as mui4 ngaa5 man4, and it is pronounced as mei2 ya3 wen2 in Mandarin (the numbers represent the tones). 梅 (mui4/mei2) is my surname “Moey”, meaning plum. Other surnames that share the same character are Moy, Mui, Mei, Mai and Mae. The spelling indicates where your family is from such as how Moy and Mui are from Hong Kong and other Cantonese-speaking regions, Mei from Mandarin-speaking regions, Mai from Vietnam, and Mae from Korea. In my case, “Moey” is pronounced as “Moy” but spelled so uniquely because my father is from Malaysia. 雅 (ngaa5/ya3) means elegant and 雯 (man4/wen2) means sophisticated. My grandmother chose this name because she wanted me to grow up into a graceful and ladylike