Talk:Jennifer 8. Lee

Meaning of 8
As far as I know, 8 means prosperity started in Cantonese-speaking areas. Chinese character "&#20843;" pronounces ha in Cantonese which is the same as "&#30332;" fah (prosperous). People in Hong Kong pay top dollars to reserve license plates that has one or multiple 8s in it. Another good number is 168 which sounds like "&#19968;&#36335;&#30332;" (prosperity all the way). In Cantonese, "&#30332;&#36948;" means "make a fortune". This term is not so widely used in many other dialects. Though "&#30332;&#36001;" (also "make a fortune") is used in most areas.


 * &
 * Cantonese: baat3
 * Mandarin: b&#257;
 * Min Nam (Taiwan): peh (/p/ pronounces like /b/ in English)
 * &
 * Cantonese: faat3
 * Mandarin: f&#257;
 * Min Nam (Taiwan): hoat (sounds like "hwa")

This custom migrated to other parts of the Chinese-speaking world in the 70s or 80s. -- Toytoy 16:38, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)

East Asian names that contain numbers
For me this section is the most interesting part of the article and probably deserves to be made an article in its own right. I went and added Sichuan and Shikoku under the "four" sub-heading but after doing so thought maybe I shouldn't have as the rest of the entries are people's names and not geographical names. Anyway, I've left them in for now.

If we do make it a separate article we should decide whether we want to limit it to just people's names. It does seem to me that the use of numbers in East Asian geographical names is interestingly different to the situation in English in that while we have numbers in names that are attached to distances such as Three Mile Island we don't have names with such stark number references as three rivers (Sichuan).

Oska 05:30, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)


 * Unless you have a good reason, it is usually not a good idea to remove a previous section of discussion. -- Toytoy 06:19, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)

Dup sig added after response that interrupted it.
 * Sorry, I really didn't mean to do that. Couldn't understand your comment until I went back and looked at that particular revision. Thanks for fixing it. Oska 00:55, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)
 * You may want to separate people and geographical names. Two defferent articles is a good solution. -- Toytoy 06:19, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
 * Agreed! I have moved the list to List of personal names that contain numbers. That page is open to all languages though I think Asian names will make up most of it. Regarding place names, I think there are just too many of them to make a page. Some unusual place names that contain numbers are already listed at List of interesting or unusual place names; those entries are marked with the number 5.
 * Still if someone wishes to make such a page, here is a reference copy of Oska's first two location name edits; please remove them from the talk page if they end up elsewhere:


 * Chinese
 * Sichuan (四川), "four rivers" - a province in eastern China
 * Japanese
 * Shikoku (四国), "four provinces" - one of the major Japanese islands
 * Lawrence Lavigne 09:51, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
 * No reason to remove them, and some not to. Please do add a note in this section, tho, if you know they appear elsewhere in en: WP main namespace. --Jerzy•t 20:46, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

"Luck" rhymes with...
The article currently claims that the reason the Chinese character for the number eight is lucky is "because the Chinese pronunciation [of the character] rhymes with the Chinese word for 'luck'."

Now I studied a few years of Chinese, and I'm just not buying this unless someone can provide an explanation or reference. There are a lot of different ways to pronounce Chinese, and eight appears to be a lucky number across dialects. 八 is pronounced 'ba' in Mandarin, and that's not like the word for luck I know &mdash; so footnotes, please!

While we are on the subject of sources, do we in fact know whether Ms. Lee's middle name is the character 八? It's a fair assumption, but could she have opted for a more arcane formulation? Does anyone know her full Chinese name?

Sandover 03:34, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * See my explaination on the top of this page. -- Toytoy 03:35, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this. Very helpful! As of this writing we are still in the dark about whether Ms. Lee's middle name is indeed the character &#20843;, but at least we got rid of the erroneous "rhymes with 'luck'" notion. Sandover 18:49, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Book project
This has been mentioned in the blogs, but not in any credible sources, as far as I can tell: Ms. Lee is apparently working on a book, whose working title is The Long March of General Tso: How Chinese Food Became All-American. I would hold off putting this into the article until we get a credible source to confirm this and announce a publication date. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 07:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
 * The info from the blogs leads back to this article in the New York Observer. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 07:22, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
 * That lk is broken; perhaps it was replaced by "Hail and Farewell at Dow Jones" dated February 10, 2006. --Jerzy•t 18:05, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Her Chinese name
What is her name in Chinese then? Presumably "李八_", where the final blank is something representing "Jennifer". What is it? -- 小? Sorry, no Chinese allowed. 23:44, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I think it might be 珍 (zhēn). -- 小? Sorry, no Chinese allowed. 22:22, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Found on Internet: the name 李竞. Badagnani (talk) 04:58, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Isn't the 8 part of her English name only?

 * ''Reformatted for visual clarity of quote. -Jerzy•t 17:35, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

This entry gives the impression that her parents added the character 八 to her Chinese name. Reading the Boston Globe article cited, though, I got the impression that "8" was added to her English name:
 * 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.

"Middle initial" to me suggests English name, not Chinese name. Doesn't the entry need to be clarified on this point? --Siweiluozi (talk) 18:32, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * And is it pronounced out "eight" in English, or is it silent, as in Hen3ry? KarlM (talk) 10:34, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Women of China/Xinhua profile of Ms. Lee
There's an article profiling Ms. Lee here: http://www.womenofchina.cn/Profiles/Writers/206808.jsp I did not have time to add details from it into the article, but someone else might. --Catch153 (talk) 03:57, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

"As much known for parties as bylines"
Puh-leeze. I have removed all the "party girl" and "sued by landlady" stuff per WP:BLP. Wikipedia is not a tabloid, etc. --JohnnyB256 (talk) 14:12, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

NY Times
I note that MS. Lee still seems to be an occasional NYTimes contributor, for example Wwwhatsup (talk) 09:31, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Removing simplified Chinese name
By |the subject's admission (now 6 years back) she actually never spells her name in simplified Chinese. I think that means it should be removed. (We also shouldn't indicate, say, how her name is spelled in Arabic.)

I'll do that in a day unless anybody objects. -ParkerHiggins ( talk contribs ) 18:18, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It doesn't matter how she prefers to write it: it's useful to have the Chinese form in the version read by 1.4 billion people along with the version still used by a few million. (Of course we should lead with her preferred form.)


 * Similarly, of course we should include the pinyin. — Llywelyn II   23:37, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Why 8. and not 8 ?
8 is not an abbreviation or an initial, it is a numeral. Is that dot a radix point or a full stop or something else ? It makes it seem like it's floating point, you might as well make it 8.0 or something. Mr. T has no dot after the T although I understand that Mr. is his name and is not an abbreviation for Mister. 64.131.247.186 (talk) 06:54, 27 June 2014 (UTC)
 * That's how she does it. PPX (talk) 20:40, 29 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Fwiw, 8. was treated as an abbreviated form of eight through centuries of English use, including the extra period. Fell out of favor as a way to save on ink, not out of any semantic argument. — Llywelyn II   23:38, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
 * It’s a decimal point. Jenny8lee (talk) 21:56, 19 August 2023 (UTC)