hi, GirlsMom,
Thanks for your warm welcome! Yes, finally I decided to come out. I have been feeling a little “guilty” about staying simply as a reader and not coming out to show my deep appreciation and support by contributing actively.
Chiu is my last name. It should be Qiu in Pin1Yin1. It was suggested by my aunt who helped my family immigrated to US when I was a sophomore in college. It helps the Americans here with a closer pronunciation than Qiu. It often confuses people in terms of where I am from. Based on the spelling, they wouldn’t think of me as a mainlander. Actually I came from Dalian. Lan is my Chinese name, it means wind on mountaintop. Most of people here in US know me as Angela, my English name, which was given to me by my English teacher in college who was a young American. Actually when I told the history behind my English name to some of my American friends/colleagues, some felt that the English teacher had no right assigning names to his Chinese students. Once I had an officemate who came from Israel at an optical startup, he said that he likes Lan much better than Angela. I joked about calling myself “wind on mountaintop”, just as the famous “dances with wolf”. I chose to use my Chinese name here since it’s a Chinese parenting forum.
Thanks for asking!
ChiuLan