The hospital sends you home with a folder, and somewhere in it is the birth registration form. Most states want it back inside sixty days.
By then a relative has usually run the chart through a free app and forwarded the screenshot. Missing metal, add metal, and the sequence has already gone wrong there. The parents start working through the dictionary for characters with the metal radical, and it is usually the same handful every other family has been through.
Missing and needed are separate questions
Counting is mechanical. Any app can tell you a chart holds no water, or only one earth. What it means depends on everything else: which season the day master was born into, what is draining or attacking it, which way the whole thing leans. The phase a chart most needs is the useful god, and it may or may not be the one that is absent. Sometimes the absent phase is absent for the better and adding it adds to the problem. That layer has a piece of its own, The Useful God and the Taboo God, so I won’t go through it again here.
Skip the middle step and you are betting that this particular chart belongs to the group where the missing phase happens to be the needed one. Some charts are, most are not, and that ratio is what the shortcut is riding on. So when that screenshot arrives, I put the line aside and go back to which month the day master was born into.
Nobody agrees on which phase a character belongs to
You rarely hear this part said out loud. Three routes are in common use.
By radical. Three dots of water is water, the metal radical is metal. Direct, and the one most people use.
By meaning. 日, 阳, 炎 and 煦 go with fire whatever their radicals look like; 山, 岩, 坤 and 培 go with earth. This route reads what the character says rather than how it is built.
By stroke count. The strokes of the surname and given name are folded into five numbers and read as a configuration. This route is modern, out of Japan, reaching the Chinese-speaking world in the 1930s, and it is what most naming software runs on. I don’t use it, for a plain reason: the counting is contested before you even reach the interpretation. Simplified or traditional. Whether to count by the Kangxi Dictionary’s original radical forms, where three dots of water counts as the four strokes of 水, the jade radical counts five, the grass radical six, so that 江 comes out at seven. Nobody who writes 江 writes seven strokes. Why the convention was fixed that way I still can’t tell you. All I know is that everyone working in that route counts it so, and numbers arrived at any other way stop agreeing with the older books.
The three routes contradict each other often. A character that is wood by radical and fire by meaning is nothing unusual. Which one do I go with? I have no rule I apply consistently. Most of the time I look at how the character sits against the other character in the given name and against the surname, and whether it leans hard one way on its own. That is not a method you can write down.
Which is why a character that arrives with a guarantee attached is worth putting down. The score naming software prints comes out of one of those three routes; run the same name down another and it scores differently. All three have their reasons. I just don’t treat the number as the conclusion.
How much the name can carry
Not much.
The chart is fixed at birth. The name is added afterwards and does not alter it. What a name can do is put slightly more or slightly less of one phase into the information a person handles daily. Set it beside the ten-year luck pillars, or beside the decisions the person makes, and it is small. It sits with colour, or with which side of the house you put the room you live in: going with the useful god makes the ride easier, and you are still the one pedalling.
The layer I take more seriously has nothing to do with metaphysics. A name is the word this child will hear more than any other for the rest of their life, and the thing they will write out tens of thousands of times: on a school exercise book, on exam papers ten years later, then on a rental lease. A name that sounds right, that people remember on first hearing, that the child himself likes, hands him back a little energy every day. The kind that gets mispronounced constantly and has to be spelled out letter by letter every time it is given over the phone runs the other way. None of that needs a metaphysical assumption, and I think it outweighs the phase layer. So I ask parents to work the other way round: pick a few you like the sound of, then bring those to the chart and see whether any of them work against it. Locking the radical first and then hunting for any character that carries it tends to produce a name nobody in the family is fond of, the child included.
Traditionally one character in a name was never the parents’ to choose. It came from the generation poem in the clan register, one character per generation, sometimes settled dozens of generations in advance. Overseas families usually lost the register, the second generation can’t write out their grandfather’s full name, and that character has nothing left to attach to. The 山 in my own name did not come from a clan register. Zhengyi keeps a generation poem of its own, and when you receive registers your dharma name takes the character of whichever generation your transmission places you in. You cannot award yourself one; it is conferred, and it appears on the certificate. More on that in Zhengyi and Quanzhen.
The Australian part
The register takes Latin letters. Chinese characters don’t go in. Pinyin does, or an English name.
Most families here put the English name in the first-name field, the pinyin given name in the middle slot, and the surname last. Some do the reverse and keep the English name for daily use only. Both work. What matters is that it comes out identical everywhere afterwards: passport, Medicare, bank, school, airline booking. Spacing is the usual casualty. Xiaoming as one word or Xiao Ming as two, applied inconsistently, and sooner or later one system won’t match another, generally on the day you are in a hurry.
Romanised surnames bring their own trouble. The same surname turns up in several spellings here, since the older generation who came through Guangdong and Hong Kong write Lau, Lew or Low while the Mandarin pinyin is Liu, and one family can look like three on paper. I go by Sean Lau in English myself. Then there are the surnames locals won’t attempt at all, Xu, Qi, Zhu, Cai, the roll call stopping halfway down the page. Ordering coffee here means giving a name for the cup, so a fair number of people end up with a third name that lives only on takeaway lids, two syllables the barista can spell first go, and nobody has ever run the phases on that one. The unsayable ones cost the child something small and daily, and by year three or four of primary school a lot of them have quietly issued themselves an English name anyway, which may not be the one you chose. Nothing at this end is calculable. The one thing to do in advance is fix the spelling and leave it fixed: however it goes on the birth certificate is how it goes on every form after that.
English names and the phases
I don’t do them, and I say so when asked. Assigning a phase to a Chinese character rests on the radical, on the meaning, and on where the sound sits in Chinese phonology. An English name has none of the three. Mapping letters onto phases, or counting the letters as strokes, moves a method somewhere its inputs don’t exist. It will still return an answer, because that kind of software always does, and the answer has nowhere to have come from.
What an English name should be chosen on is more ordinary. Whether people get it right first time, and what it sounds like run together with the surname. Whether autocorrect quietly turns it into something else, which is the one that catches people out on enrolment forms. And how many other kids in the same school year already have it. None of that is metaphysics. I answer them anyway, because parents ask.
By the time anyone asks me, the parents usually have a character they already love, and they want to hear it doesn’t work against the chart. When it doesn’t, that is what I tell them. When it does, I say where, and the name is still theirs to settle.