Okay gonna put in an EARLY request here for OFMD fandom.
The character's name is Zhang Yi Sao. That's a real historical figure, very very awesome pirate queen. Her name isn't "Susan." That's what she went by when undercover selling soup.
I beg people to use her real name and not a fake one that may be easier for you to spell and pronounce. She doesn't introduce herself or tell anyone to call her Susan after her real identity is revealed and people in the show call her Zhang. Or Queen, I suppose.
So please, as someone from Chinese fandoms who has seen the amount of microagressions fandoms get up to when dealing with "weird and difficult" Chinese names...can we not?
If you're worried about spelling, ZYS would be how Chinese names are typically abbreviated in fandom. And Zhang isn't inherently any harder to type than Susan.
Trying to get ahead of things a little here, as a white American person who has learned things the hard way over the last few years.
just a small correction that the name is Zheng Yi Sao (鄭一嫂), all points from op still stand
Questions: is Zheng her family name and Yi Sao her given name? (Like Japanese/Korean names) Or is it the other way around? And is Yi Sao one name (like Korean) so like that should never be split up?
Yes, Zheng is her family name and Yi Sao is the personal name. (郑一嫂, zhèng yì sǎo) (thanks to @tetrapaec for the pinyin)
EDIT: Taking this back. Zheng Yi Sao is her professional name, essentially her pirate name. It's not her given name at all. Zheng Yi was her husband's name. But it is the name she used for the rest of her life, seemingly. So you would never break up the name at all, really, since the whole thing is a title.
I was replying based on general knowledge of naming conventions, not having studied her specifically.
Sometimes names are transliterated to be all one like Yisao or YiSao, but most correct is probably to simply keep it separate. It wouldn't be split up except in certain cases with additions that would make it diminutive or more personal, like a nickname. (There are prefixes and suffixes that denote family relationships, status, etc, similar to Japanese.)
Beyond that it's difficult to say like correct address for certain characters given the show is in English and it's ahistorical so...IDK. I feel like the characters in the show are showing respect and being vaguely historical in calling her by her family name, same as like they'd say "Badminton."
Hope I have gotten that fairly right, I'm not a Mandarin speaker, so feel free to correct me.
Three things!
First, the tones are Zhèng Yī Sǎo (not yì).
Second, the normal mainland Mandarin pinyin convention for given names would be to not split the personal name up, e.g. Máo Zédōng, ✅ not Máo Zé Dōng ❌.
But her name was not Zhèng Yīsǎo ❌. Her husband’s name was Zhèng Yī. 嫂 (sǎo) is a form of address for an elder brother’s wife and for the wife of a person about the same age as you. It’s one of those suffixes you mentioned, in fact! So she was addressed by the title “Zhèng Yī’s wife”: Zhèng Yī Sǎo. ✅
Thirdly, this is all in Mandarin, which was not her mother tongue. She was from Guangdong: she spoke Cantonese.
Her real name was Shek Yeung ✅ (most faithfully transcribed in jyutping as sek6 joeng4, translated in Mandarin pinyin to Shí Yáng). The title she would have used for herself was Zeng Yat Sou ✅ (zeng6 jat1 sou2).
You’ll also see Ching Shih but that’s Wade Giles romanisation and if you don’t know what that means, run
Reblogging because it does matter that she spoke Cantonese and was based in Hong Kong (Lantau, specifically).
I had to learn Mandarin in school in Hong Kong because the mainland government was putting the screws into Hong Kong even when I was a kid. I’m not Cantonese, but I’m troubled that Cantonese is never celebrated. If people learn about famous Cantonese people, they only know their names in Mandarin—a language many of those people didn’t even speak.
A Hong Kong pirate queen deserves to have people at least know the Cantonese name she called herself by.
