Living with an obscure name

Beijing TV profiles a woman named Ma Cheng who writes her name with a particularly obscure character:

Ma’s name is written 马𩧢. Your browser probably won’t display that character, which should look like three 馬 (“horse”) characters stuck together horizontally:

In the video, Ma explains that her parents were inspired by a trend where given names are made up of a tripled surname, as in 金鑫 and 石磊. For her name, they decided to use a horizontally-composed character rather than the comparatively more common stacked character 骉.

Although Ma says her grandfather found the character in the Cihai, a large dictionary, the show has its doubts that the three-horse cheng character really exists. Intrepid journalists comb through reference works and finally locate it in the Kangxi Dictionary (page scan), where it’s listed as a variant form of 骋, “gallop”.

What’s interesting about Ma’s story is how her name has been handled by business and government agencies she’s dealt with during her 26 years. Some have hand-written the character, while others have gone the toneless pinyin route: 马CHENG.

More technologically-sophisticated systems have no problem handling her name. It’s printed on her passport, and when she flies it only takes a few extra minutes for the airport to figure out how to input the character. And a rental agency demonstrates to reporters how they used a built-in Microsoft Windows tool (the Private Character Editor eudcedit.exe) to build the character themselves.

Predictably, PSB computers are behind the curve, and they’ve been a major source of the problems Ma Cheng has had with her name. Her first-generation ID card, with its hand-written cheng character, has expired, and because PSB computers are unequipped to handle a printed version, she can’t get a second-generation card. Inside the country, passports aren’t widely accepted as a valid form of identification for Chinese nationals, so a PSB-issued ID card is pretty much a necessity.

If a name change ultimately turns out to be absolutely necessary, Ma intends to choose the four-character name 马马马马. That name’s not exactly problem-free, either: Ma Cheng reads it as “Ma Mamama,” but the host seems to think it’s “Mama Mama.”