My online name Shengliver sounds weird to some ears. It has puzzled many friends. “How should I pronounce your name? What does it mean?” they asked.

My real name is Shengli, meaning in English “victory”. My paternal grandad gave the name to me upon my birth in the hope that I would be a success. When I was a kid, Grandad told me that the time I came to the world was when the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966—1976) was supposed to flourish and bear fruit.

Shengli incurred shame, though, for my performance in the world did not match the well-intentioned name. I still have a vivid recollection of my arithmetic teacher in primary school sneering at me because my miserable score in a quiz contrasted sharply with the pompous title Shengli. “Why do you boast the name Shengli if you cannot work out the simplest arithmetic problem in the world?” she jeered.

Despite the humiliation, I am grateful for the name my grandad came up with for me. I have kept urging myself to work hard to live up to it and to honour it over the years. In middle school I plucked up courage to ask my father a number of times to have the name changed but he insisted I hold onto it. During my adolescent years, a sense of honour towards the name was one of my strongest motivations for progress.

I bought my first PC in 2003 and went wired the next year. Virtual reality is not the real world, and I had to coin a name for my presence on the Web. I changed Shengli into Shengliver and adopted it as my cyber title. Of course, as you can see, my reader, it originates from my real name Shengli. Is there a meaning behind the three English letters V-E-R?

Yes, there is. I have had an enduring interest in the English language. I majored in English language education in college, but it was no more than a two-year program. Having studied in college for merely two years, I graduated with an associate degree. Though two years is like a blink of the eye on the life journey, it was my diligence during the short span that laid firm foundations for my English learning and that spawned Shengliver’s ultimate devotion to the language. My academic merit in those two years earned me a teaching position in one of the most prestigious high schools in the area. V-E-R has something to do with the English language.

V stands for victory, which is the English for my Chinese name, E for English, and R for research. Put together, VER is Victory English Research. I am serious about the English language itself and about research into ways that English is used in the Chinese context.

When I was creating an online name back in 2004, it occurred to me that VER, added to Shengli, would make the combination Shengliver sound anglicised. Better still, the name is the only one of its kind on the Web, where no one else uses it. Hence the name.

The stress falls on the second syllable. The name sounds like sheng-LI-ver. Read this way, it is almost the same as my Chinese pet name, which Gran used for me when I was a child. The suffix “ver” indicates a child in Mandarin.

There have been some misinterpretations from my friends on the Web. One of them says that shen is the Chinese name of an animal organ “kidney” and liver the English name of another. He draws a conclusion that the name Shengliver suggests that I am either a surgeon or a butcher. Another friend says that Shengliver is a blend of Chinese and English, the first part sheng (Chinese) meaning “live” and the second part liver (English) a person who enjoys life. Those interpretations are fantastically logical but they are a far far cry from the blogger’s original intention. They are WRONG.