The Dolls Formerly Known as Friendlies

Below are the 2008 Olympic Mascots, the FuWa (福娃). Fu (福) means good fortune, and Wa (娃) means baby or doll, making these "little good fortune babies," indeed a good choice for Olympic Mascots.
There are a lot of reasons why the Fu Wa (there are no plurals in Chinese, so it's one FuWa, two FuWa) make good mascots, and a lot of reasons why FuWa is a great name for them. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to ask, do you think FuWa is a better name than "The Five Friendlies"?

You see, the FuWa were originally announced with an English name, the Five Friendlies. Each Friendly had a different name, and they represented the Olympic flame plus four popular China animals (the fish, the panda, the chart-topping Tibetan antelope, and the summer sleeper hit swallow bird).

If you go to the official 2008 Beijing Olympics website and click on "Image & Look" then "mascot" now, the name Five Friendlies is nowhere to be found, and the good fortune babies are called only, "FuWa." Someone on the Chinese Olympic Committee realized (imagined?) that foreigners - foreigners, mind you, not Chinese people with hastily acquired Olympic English skills - would misread the word Friendlies, which has a very positive meaning, as Friend Lies, which has a decidedly negative meaning. China would not want to be the Friend Who Lies, nor would it want to propagate the belief that Friends Lie, thus the name had to be changed. Apparently, they did not consult any foreigners on this change, since foreigners certainly would have pointed out the potential mis-readings of a name that starts with F-U.

So, the Friendlies are now the FuWa, still a group of small children each representing a different animal/ symbol and the color of a different Olympic ring. I have to say, although I think the thought process of ditching the name "Friendlies" is laughable, I think the result is a good one: the Olympic mascots for the Beijing Olympics should have a Chinese name, or at least a name that reflects China in some way.

In case anyone out there doubts the Chinese are capitalists to the core, I assure you, these dolls were made to sell. Not only are they charming, but there are five different ones, forcing the enthusiastic consumer to purchase five times as many products. Some previous Olympics have had bi- or tri-mascots (Athena & Phevos from Greece, for instance), but leave it to the Chinese to have the most ever. I believe there are also plans to have a mascot image for each sporting event, for instance, YingYing the Tibetan antelope playing table tennis, and Nini the swallow kite diving for a volleyball. I know I will not be able to resist buying several (how on Earth to choose between HuanHuan, the Olympic flame whose name also means "welcome", and JingJing, the panda with a lotus flower on his head?).

I definitely recommend anyone with even the slightest interest check out the Beijing Olympics official mascot page. There is a lot of information there, and like so many things in China, a mind-boggling amount of reflection went into the design for these little stuffed animals. The selection of their names really illustrates a lot about Chinese language and culture. Most notable:

• Each FuWa has a double character name: Beibei, JingJing, HuanHuan, YingYing, NiNi. Chinese love 2-character words, especially nouns, and particularly when referring to cute or familiar things. Thus, "Thank you" is "xie xie" 谢谢, a repetition of the same word, because to just leave a single "xie" hanging out there would be somehow incomplete, lacking. Likewise, nicknames are rarely ever a single-character name. Addressing a friend with a single word might sound harsh. Soft, round, 2-character words sound much nicer to the Chinese ear.
• Take the sound of the first character of each of the FuWa's names and string them together, and you get the sentence, "Beijing welcomes you!" The actual characters don't have that meaning (the "bei" in BeiBei the fish's name for instance, actually means treasure or baby, not "north" as in Beijing), but as I mentioned when talking about tigers, a symbol that looks or sounds like the real thing is often as good as the real thing in Chinese traditions.
  
• The stringing together of the FuWa's names also brings up another point: Chinese often refer to groups of things or complex concepts by abbreviating each component from it's 2- or 3-character word to it's first character. For example, the administration and policies of President Hu JinTao and Premier Wen JiaBao is called the Hu-Wen Xin Zheng (胡温新政): Hu 胡 is short fo Hu JinTao, Wen 温 short for WenJiaBao, xin 新 means new, and zheng 政 is the first character in the words for government, politics, and policy. So four syllables represent several concepts and a very long English phrase.
  

As Professor Yu, my first Chinese teacher, would say, "Chinese is so elegant, so logical!"