Jennifer 8 explained her middle number in a 1996 story in the Boston Globe, which is reproduced below without permission. There remains no explanation of why editors let her use it in bylines.<p>At first sight, everyone thinks my middle initial is a typo - a mutant "B" perhaps, or a hyperextended "S." It seems bizarre - an unnatural junction of math and English. But when it appears again and again, the question arises: It isn't really an 8, is it? <p>Indeed it is. I am not named after the Uma Thurman movie ("Jennifer 8"), nor am I the eighth child in my family. To quench the curiosity I've so often encountered, I'll explain the origins of my numerical middle initial. It comes from Chinese numerology, where the number 8 is highly revered as a symbol of good fortune. My wacky middle initial arose from the generic quality of the rest of my name. In their great wisdom, my parents decided to pair Lee, the second most common Chinese surname, with the most popular name for newborn girls in 1976, Jennifer. <p>Jennifer Lee (like David Kim and Michael Chang), is one of the John Smiths of Asian-American names. Of the 18,000 applicants to Harvard's class of 2000, 12 were Jennifer Lees - more than any other single name. <p>The mix-ups in mail, e-mail and college applications are things I've grown used to. But when my family realized I was one of about 10,000 Jennifer Lees in the United States (at least 70 in New York City, where I'm from) the adoption of a middle initial seemed to be in order. And appealing to Chinese superstition, we arrived at a natural choice: the number 8. My identity has not been confused since. <p>Unfortunately, many computers are not equipped to handle a nonalphabet letter in the middle-name field of their databases, though I've had offers from companies and organizations that they would consider reprogramming their computers. So sometimes I sit initial-less or am forced to spell out the eight. <p>So why 8? <p>The number 8 has a near-mystical following in Chinese society. License plates with 8s are auctioned off for astronomical prices (which almost always contain an 8) in Hong Kong. In Taiwan, phone numbers with an excessive number of 8s can be purchased from the phone company. Chinese-American businesses are bouncing in glee at the toll-free 888 numbers that were recently introduced. <p>And the respect does not end at the fringes of Chinese society. The multimillion-dollar business executive reveres the number 8 as much as a pop in a mom-and-pop noodle shop. As any American business executive who has worked with Chinese companies can attest, the Chinese are adamant that closing prices always contain 8s. Instead of buying a building in Shanghai for $ 10 million, the purchasing price will often be $ 10,008,888. <p>On a visit to the United States, Chinese businessmen rubbed the head of an infant son of a Boston executive for good luck. The baby had been born on Aug. 8, 1988 - supposedly one of the luckiest days in this century. I was actually in Taiwan that summer, and I remember the hoopla that surrounded the occasion, more so than if an eclipse occurred on Feb. 29. <p>It has been exactly eight years since Aug. 8, 1988 - so perhaps today will bring good luck as well. <p>The reverence for eights follows Chinese immigrants to this side of the world. <p>There is a Chinese supermarket on Herald Street near Chinatown called 88 and a restaurant called Bat Dat, for "Eight Successes." <p>And the reverence for eights will even emerge in sinister situations. Last summer in New York City, a Chinese gang kidnapped a Chinese woman, handcuffed her to a radiator and demanded $ 38,000 in ransom from her family. They proceeded to lower that to $ 28,000 and finally down to $ 10,800, before police caught them and released the woman. Even criminals appeal to blessings from Chinese numerology. The reverence for the number 8, comes from its pronunciation in Chinese - ba (in Mandarin) and bat (in Cantonese) - which has a similar intonation to the Chinese word for fortune - fa (in Mandarin) and fat (in Cantonese). That fat is the fat in the "gong hay fat choy (congratulations and good fortune)," a greeting for the Chinese New Year. <p>Admittedly, the homophone is somewhat of a stretch, nowhere near how the number 4 - si (with a downward tone) - approximates the word for death - si (with a falling then rising tone). <p>The Chinese language is full of the homophonic associations that come with a limited combination of consonant, vowels and tones. The New Year's banquet table is filled with quasi-homophones: Apples, oranges and fish are served because they respectively sound like the Chinese words for "peace," "luck" and "plentiful." Clocks should never be given as presents to Chinese families because the word for clock, zhong, is an exact homophone for the word for final - or death. <p>Chinese culture impresses me in the way it continues to weave the superstitions and traditions of 5,000 years together with the needs of modern society. But what I also find elegant is the natural way that numbers are interwoven into the Chinese language. <p>As an applied math and economics major who is striving to become a journalist, I am stymied by how little the spheres of the technical and mathematical and of the written and literary overlap. The raised eyebrows, smirks and skeptical looks my middle initial and I encounter have made me realize how odd the juxtaposition of number and name is. <p>It is not unusual for Chinese parents to put numbers in their children's Chinese names, though generally they try to aim for something more creative. <p>Our family friends, the Lius, named their first son Yi, which quite simply means "One." Fortunately, the second son escaped being named "Two." <p>Other families did not stop counting after their first child. I know one family in New York City (also Lees) who based their children's Chinese names on one through five. <p>Except for the character Six on the NBC television show "Blossom," and some passing superstitions on the numbers 7 and 13, numerology and numerical names are absent from mainstream Western culture. <p>So I sit, as a quirky Asian-American girl, at a very mainstream American newspaper, holding a flag that displays my cultural heritage and my love of numbers. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will give my children numbers for middle initials. And why stop at rational numbers? I have always thought pi (3.14159) or Euler's e (2.718), which appear all over mathematics, would make nice middle names. Don't you?<p>***No.***<p>[ September 26, 2002: Message edited by: blanp ]</p>
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