森林李

I love a Chinese name with a good story behind it. And this one I learned about is neat and poetic.

I asked a colleague of mine why the characters for his name are “backwards” – his English name is Forrest but instead of “sum lum” (forest) they went with “lum sum”. I actually can’t remember his explanation for flipping the two characters.

But he did divulge to me that there is deep symbolism to his name.

In the Lee (李) surname, the bottom component (子) is “zee” and means son. In his Lee family, he was the only male born amongst his cousins. There are as many tree characters (six) in 森林李 as he has female cousins.

Neat!