沈巍 / Shen Wei - What’s in a name?

[foxghost]

So I tagged in that other post #I could go on and on about Shen Wei’s name, and so why not.

This is the exchange between Kunlun and Shen Wei, the first time they meet. (chapter 77, so mildly spoilerish. The more spoilery part, I hid under a cut.)

“You can’t speak? Impossible.” Kunlun Jun drapes shapelessly onto the large boulder, lifting a brow. “Got a name? What are you called?”

“… Wei.”

“Which Wei?”

“…Mountain ghost.”

“Mountain ghost?” Kunlun Jun stretches out over the boulder, lifting a brow, “Appropriate, but a bit weak. Look at this world: mountains and oceans joining one to the next, towering peaks linking in an unending chain. Why not add a few more strokes, make a Wei.”

[TN. 嵬, what the ghost king introduced himself as, means “rocky terrain.” 嵬 is written with the radical ‘mountain’ on top of ‘ghost’. 巍 means ‘towering’ and keeps both of the radicals of 嵬]

Now let’s move on to 沈 / Shen, for a moment.

沈 / shen is the older form of 沉 / chen (meaning sunken). You can still spot it used instead of 沉 in older texts, in Taiwan, some parts of southern China. It’s a very, very old word, and it looked in ancient script (zhou era) like an animal halfway in the water. It was a sacrificial word, and the antonym of ‘float.’ There’s no mention of how he came by this last name in the novel, so we can assume he chose it for himself.

Kunlun has turned Wei’s name from the height of a boulder to a mountain. It gave Shen Wei that much farther to sink. And of course, as Zhanhun-shi that’s where he always goes when he’s not above in the human world or working. He goes ‘home’ to beneath 忘川, literally underneath a river ZYL claimed took HOURS to swim to the bottom of.

Now, take a look at this:

萬山之祖，巍巍崑崙

The ancestor of ten thousand mountains, towering Kunlun

Simplified Chinese REALLY DESTROYS IT.

That’s actually carved on a (2) memorial stone(s) in northwestern China. It’s also known as the “source of the dragon artery.”

Let’s discard simplified Chinese for a moment (sorry) and consider the traditional writing of the same text:

巍巍崑崙 / pinyin: Wéiwéi kūnlún

They are all topped with a mountain radical. In chapter 75, Shen Wei says this to Zhao Yunlan:

崑崙君身上壓著十萬大山，那麼痛苦，我捨不得你過那樣的日子。
Kunlun Jun is pressed beneath a hundred thousand mountains, I could not bear to watch you live in such pain.

…this is a lie. But it doesn’t make it any less true that keeping the name signifies his taking on all of Kunlun’s responsibilities. I’ll not elaborate on why Kunlun named Shen Wei 巍, but it’s definitely a name that links the ghost king to him. Shen Wei’s chose the last name Shen for himself: he made himself a sacrifice to a god.

/or you know, p大 chose it because it sounds nice. It does sound nice.