What are the Chinese characters for the names of the Chinese American characters?

Question

In Banana Fish, a number of Chinese American characters are introduced. The characters appear to come from a Cantonese-speaking background, based on what I have seen so far in vol. 4:

• Golzine remarks that Lee is referred to as daai yan, which corresponds to the Cantonese for 大人. (The Mandarin pronunciation would be da ren.)

• In the same section, Lee also tells Golzine that he provide the services of Yut Lung to him. This romanization clearly does not come from a Mandarin background, since Mandarin does not use non-nasal ending consonants (n and ng) outside of r. Yut Lung also corresponds to the Cantonese pronunciation of 月龍, which based on Golzine's remarks is the correct set of characters for the name.

Later on, we are introduced to characters with the names Yau-Si and Suk-Leui. Do we know the Chinese characters for these names and any others that may appear in the manga? I do not know enough Cantonese to be able to make meaningful guesses, particularly when Chinese names are rarely formed with coherent combinations of characters that make guessing easy. I tried the fan wiki, but there wasn't any information from a quick glance, and being only in the middle of vol. 4 currently, I didn't want to risk spoiling myself.

Answer 1

From circumstantial evidence, I would guess that we do not have any systematic information about character names, insofar as there are a number of inconsistencies and as the listings on the Chinese language Wikipedia page for Banana Fish seem somewhat implausible.

• In the section of the manga that follows Yut-Lung's introduction, we see him address Shorter in Chinese. Shorter's name is written as 肖达. This appears to be a Mandarin transcription (xiào dá) of Shorter's name. In fact, the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 肖 and 达 (達 in the traditional form) do not produce a plausible transcription for Shorter, and a better transcription for the first syllable can probably be found.

  Shorter's surname is Wong, which is typically derived from the Cantonese reading of 王 or 黃. (Wikipedia also lists 汪, which is significantly less common.) However, the Chinese Wikipedia lists Shorter's surname as 翁, which does not appear to be read as Wong in any Chinese dialect. Japanese Wikipedia only gives the katakana for Shorter Wong.

• Sing's name is listed as 辛舒霖 on Chinese Wikipedia, 辛 being his surname, but his entry on Japanese Wikipedia only contains katakana. In a conversation with Yut-Long later in the manga, it is revealed that his name means "devil." But 舒 means comfortable and 霖 refers to rain. Moreover, 灵 is a much more obvious character choice for the syllable ling, as it means spirit.

• Lee Wang-Lung is a mish-mash of Cantonese (Lee Wong-Lung) and Mandarin (Li Wanglong) pronunciation of the constituent characters. There is a similar problem with Lee Hua-Lung (Lee Wah-Lung and Li Hualong)