thedarkmaster-bater asked you:

what’s jem’s proper chinese name, like first and last with characters?

Jem is Ke Jian Ming. I don’t know how to put characters on Tumblr. ☹ But I have noted down that this is “a different Ming than the “common” one (bright). this one is a character with mouth and bird next to it, which means birds singing. she says it’s associated with singers as well as those who can beguile with music.”

She in this case is my friend Cindy Pon’s mother, who I torture constantly with questions about Mandarin. The woman is a saint.

It is worth keeping in mind that in Chinese, the surname comes first. Initially when I was thinking about this question I went looking for research about it – as there was nothing that necessarily said Jem had a full Chinese name: there’s so little about biraciality that you can research for that period, there’s no hard and fast rules. I assumed his surname was “Carstairs” and that was that. But then I thought perhaps his mother might want him to have a name more fully Chinese, in which case the surname here, “Ke,” would be hers, and his name is Jian (meaning “healthy” or “sword”) and Ming — which together sounds a little like James and has the added connotation of music.

Anyway, hopefully I haven’t balled that up too badly. Sorry, Cindy’s mom!