Chapter 135: Your Family Name, My Name I
“My name’s Gou Dan, don’t laugh.”
“Right, right. Gou as in dog and Dan as in egg?”
“Yes. My family name is Gou and my name is Dan.”
“Do you know how valuable my name is?”
“50,000,000! And that’s not even inflated.”
“Me, too! Genuinely good at a genuine price.”
“Do you wanna change your child’s surname? Lowest price guaranteed, 70,000!”
“Wait, why are you leaving? What’s wrong with having Gou as a surname? It sounds better than your Li, no?”
“Bastard! Come back! Try that again! Who’s the dog?”
…
2015, October 11. A news conference, held by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, announced the implementation of the nation’s two-child policy.
2016, January 1, implementation day, is when all evil started.
The most immediate effect of the policy was a spike in birthrate.
It has always been a tradition for the first child, male or female, to take his or her father’s surname.
The second child, if a female, could possibly inherit her mother’s.
If the second child is a male, there’s only a 10% chance of him following his mother’s surname.
This was the general research outcome of that national policy. However, if this subject was brought up in the news channels, all men would say that they are willing to have their second child inherit their wives’ surnames.
Ultimately, the idea of taking on a father’s family name never changed, which resulted in the collapse of surnames.
By the time people finally realized it, it was already too late.
They were 30 years late and everything had already turned on its head.
From 2016, January 1 to 2020, January 1, the population of China increased by 80%.
The five most popular surnames were Li, Wang, Zhang, Liu, and Chen.
Statistics:
1. Li – 14.94% = 185,300,000 people.
2. Wang – 14.41% = 168,900,000 people.
3. Zhang – 14.07% = 164,800,000 people.
4. Liu – 10.38% = 124,600,000 people.
5. Chen – 8.53% = 104,400,000 people.
These surnames occupied about 60% of China’s population.
The later generations coined this period the Surname War Boom.
This war led to the demise of two-character surnames from 2022 onward.
Names like Zhuge, Ouyang, Sima, Murong, and so on.
Of course, that was just the beginning. No one really noticed when it was being reported on the news.
Some more time passed and from that period until the year 2025, the top five surnames started phasing out the rest.
They took over 80% of the population by 2025.
Medias started reporting the phenomenon but again, no one really thought about what that meant for the future.
The government came up with a solution, which was to enforce the law that the second child must follow the mother’s surname.
However, that just worked to slow the extinction of certain surnames, not prevent it.
10 years later, in the year 2035, the second surname war erupted.
The surname Li, alone, gradually took up 63% of all surnames in the nation.
Li became the official national surname. You could just grab two random people on the streets and it was guaranteed that one of them, possibly both, would be a Li.
This was yet another beginning of the surname war.
It was then that the Book of Family Names became the Book of Family Names.
Before 2016, there were a total of 504 surnames, but by 2035, only 106 were left.
The top three surnames emerged from there: Li, Wang, and Zhang.
Liu and Chen became part of the minority.
By this point, the experts were already predicting that in the next 10 years, only two major surnames would remain.
People would just be either a Li or a Wang.
They were wrong, apparently, since only one main surname was left by the year 2045.
Li – 99.94% = 1700,629,418 people.
The rest of the surnames occupied a meager 0.06%.
Only 10 million out of 1.7 billion had a different surname from Li, and they were scattered all around China, few and far in between.
People finally understood the concept of the collapse of surnames.
20 years ago, the ethnic minorities became history and the Han ethnic group took over the whole of China.
People understood that those occupying rare surnames were like the ethnic minorities in the past.
Seeking one with a rare surname was akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
The collapse of surnames started affecting lives. Police stations, airports, train stations, banks and the like, were all starting to feel the impact.
Let’s take a police station as an example.
If a robber commits a crime, there is a 99.9% chance that he’s a Li.
Whatever his name is, Li Yi for example, there would be at least thousands if not tens of thousands, with the same name.
It has become much more difficult for the police to investigate and identify criminals accurately.
Under immense pressure, the nation thought up a new strategy that was implemented in the year 2046.
No repeated names were allowed.
All newborns must have different names.
Upon the execution of the law, naming became the most important part of having a child.
Naming children became unimaginably tough.
There were two ways of doing it. The parents could either choose a name themselves or generate one through the computer program.
Names could contain numbers and case-sensitive letters.
Names mustn’t contain more than 6 characters, and a letter of the alphabet or a number was considered half a character.
So there were only two outcomes.
Some would pick a name by flipping through the dictionary and finding some characters that were extremely difficult to write.
Example: Li Goudan (李韝黵)
Even then, such names were most likely already registered.
The easier method would be to run through the name generator until something you’re happy with pops out.
Example: Li ChenG6d3 (李尘G6d3).
But who would fancy having such messy numbers and letters?
Of course, names like Li 6666666666 were extremely valuable.
While it doesn’t make any sense, names like Li Dabian1 and Li Zhizhang2 wouldn’t be available unless you add some numbers and letters to it.
Names have become a kind of luxury, giving birth to a new occupation in the market – Name Reseller.
Resellers would basically snatch a good name before auctioning it up.
They buy low and sell high, basically.
That way, names became more and more expensive.
If you want to get hold of a better name, you’d better be ready with at least a few hundred thousands.
It even became a normal occurrence for the rich to spend millions on a good name.
Last year, after the death of someone with the name Li Xiaolong3, the name was put up for auction.
Its price went up to a hundred and forty million dollars and became the most expensive name of all time.
Of course, the resale applied only to the name and not the surname.
Newborns’ surname was another story.
There was another unique profession that emerged from the black market – Surname Changer.
As the name implies, the surname changer would help a woman alter her surname because it was too difficult to name her newborn child since both her husband and herself were Lis.
Surname Changers were those who possess the minority of surnames.
They weren’t Lis.
Of course, they charged differently, at times cheap and at times costly.
Even then, the cheapest surname would go for hundreds of thousands and the more expensive ones would cost millions.
If a woman was looking to change her surname from Li to Wang, she would get a divorce eight months into her pregnancy and get married to a Wang. She would have her newborn take over the surname changer’s family name before divorcing him and remarrying her child’s biological father.
That way, she could get a child, male or female, with the surname Wang despite the fact that both her husband and herself were Lis.
Thus, the surname changer’s job was to sign a few contracts within two months and earn a big sum from there.
Of course, the government knew of this profession and strictly prohibited such behaviors.
Nevertheless, because of the appealing profits, many started forging their identities and placing s in the black markets, walls, and the Internet.
The government warned those with rare surnames that they would investigate those who marry more than five times within a year.
Although those guilty would be punished by law, many surname changers still existed.
The situation was inevitable, unsolvable, and unacknowledged.
People no longer greeted a stranger with a ‘have you eaten?’ but rather with a ‘what’s your name?’.
If you wanted to know if a person is rich, you can easily gauge it from his name instead of looking at the way he dresses.
If he introduces himself as Li Xiaolong, you’d know that he’s worth at least a hundred and forty million.
…
Year 2063.
I’m Gou Dan, a surname changer.
Almost all with rare surnames have become surname changers.
Of course, my surname doesn’t sound too great.
Yes, I know… Gou as in dog.
Because of that, it was impossible for me to charge a high price so I’m almost always starving in spite of this job.
“Dear Sirs and Madams, wanna get a different surname for your child? Only 70,000! Lowest price guaranteed!” I shouted, raising my identification card from inside of the black market.
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