# How is "Fah Lo Suee" pronounced? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 17, 2001, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989 "2001-11-17T21:20:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dr\_hermes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dfb087/32.png) [@dr\_hermes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dr_hermes)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2001, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/1 "2001-11-17T21:20:38Z")
Yes, I’m still reviewing the Fu Manchu books over on my web site, having finished Doc Savage, and the question has come up-- how is Fah Lo Suee pronounced? (hopefully not ‘soo-eee’, like the traditional pig call.) This is the daughter of Fu Manchu, and the name supposedly means ‘sweet perfume’. We’re told it is not her real name, only a childhood nickname. ``` Online Chinese/English dictionaries appear hopelessly intimidating to me, and I'm hoping the cosmopolutan, citizen-of-the-world Straight Dope folks will immediately be able to enlighten me. ``` ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2001, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/2 "2001-11-17T23:14:59Z")
IANC, but I have some printed Chinese dictionaries, and I looked these up. Unless Sax Rohmer was drawing on some obscure Chinese words that weren’t included in my dictionaries, I think this name is bogus. The word for ‘sweet’ is _tian_. The word for ‘perfume’ is _xiang_. _Tian_ means sweet tasting, like honey. For sweet smelling, the dictionary gives _xiangde_, which means ‘perfumed’. _Fa_ corresponds to many characters of various tones with many different meanings, but none of them come anywhere near meaning ‘sweet’. There is only one word _lo_, which is a grammatical particle that wouldn’t be used in a name. _Sui_ has no meanings that come anywhere near ‘perfume’. At first I thought it might be a corruption of _shui_ ‘water’, but then I realized that the whole thing is probably bogus. Rohmer was a hack author who, back in the 1920s, probably didn’t think any of his readers would bother checking up on his “Chinese.” Nowadays we are more accustomed to authenticity of foreign languages in fiction. In movies when someone speaks a foreign language they’d better get it accurate. We have lots of bilingual people from other countries who are now fully part of the American & British cultural world. But in Rohmer’s time the British middle class (his readership) was unlikely to include many Chinese speakers who would call him on it. Rohmer also wrote lots of (now forgotten) Orientalist fiction set in the Middle East, and his Arabic was apparently better than his Chinese. Oddly, his novels are repeatedly cited as sources in Garland Cannon’s _The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary_. It’s an otherwise scholarly work, but it bizarrely relies for cites on a cheezy hack author of pulp novels. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2001, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/3 "2001-11-17T23:29:08Z")
> [@](#): > > As a thriller writer Ward is of little importance. His prose is pompous, and ponderous, and his plotting thin and predictable – the latter characteristic not aided by his habit of reusing plots and episodes. Just couldn’t resist a chance for a parting shot at Sax Rohmer. From this site, [http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Teaching/Robiog.html](http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Teaching/Robiog.html) > [@](#): > > For all of Ward’s pretensions as a composer of well-written popular fiction, he was never considered more to be more than a writer of lurid lowbrow shockers by his contemporaries. His reputation today rests on his creation of Fu Manchu, but largely because it has become a byword for racist stereotyping of Chinese people. The pervasiveness of the figure of the Chinese villain gave rise to contemporary complaints, and even to efforts by the Chinese Nationalist government in the 1930s to thwart Hollywood adaptations of such works. Such moves ultimately had little impact on such a widely disseminated stereotype, but the fact that Ward **was killed by ‘Asiatic flu’** on 1 June 1959 was not lacking in **poetic justice** – as ‘Sax Rohmer’ himself might have appreciated at a healthier moment. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2001, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/4 "2001-11-18T00:48:48Z")
I’m pretty sure it’s made up goggly-gook approximation of Chinese. Normally, the surname would be the first syllable (sometimes the first two syllables), then the name would be the second and third syllable. So his daughter should share the same “Fu” family name but it’s come out as “Fah.” It is _possible_ that the name was romanized into the Western style of name first, surname last, but that doesn’t make much sense to me in this case. If by some strange chance this is really based on a real name perhaps courtesy of a Chinese restaurant employee, then it’s probably from some Chinese dialect, possibly slang or a child’s pet name, with a really haphazard romanization system. Trying to figure that out without the original characters is well neigh impossible. ---
**Author:** ![Hemlock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Hemlock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hemlock)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2001, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/5 "2001-11-18T01:06:07Z")
Looks like it’s just made up. In Cantonese, the sound “fa” can mean “flower” or “to change”. The sound “lo” can mean “old” and lots of other things. But there is no sound corresponding to “swee”. In Hokkien, it might be different (I’ve come across Hokkien speakers who romanize part of their names as “Swee”. And in Mandarin, different again. The 2 best on-line Ch Dictionaries I know… [http://www.chinalanguage.com/](http://www.chinalanguage.com/) Has all sorts of dialects cross-referenced > **[Learn Chinese Characters](http://www.zhongwen.com/)** > > Free web version of Chinese Characters published by Yale University Press. Etymological ---
**Author:** ![dr\_hermes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dfb087/32.png) [@dr\_hermes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dr_hermes)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2001, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-fah-lo-suee-pronounced/93989/6 "2001-11-18T01:31:15Z")
One thing about Fu Manchu, thought, despite the popular image of him as a simplestereotype-- he was a supergenius who spoke a dozen languages, had degrees from Edinburgh, Heidelberg and Oxford, was a top surgeon and biochemist, and in fact rediscovered the ancient alchemist’ elixir vitae, the ‘oil of life’ that gave prolonged youth. He always kept his word, spared innocents at the risk of his own life and in general behaved better than the British did in those books. ``` If you were to read the books again with a slightly modern interpretation, Fu Manchu was fighting to overthrow the British Empire and restore political power in Asia and the Mideast to its own people. His methods were cruel and bizarre, of course, going to so far as to fake the deaths of great scientists to force them to serve him, but his goal was one modern readers might approve. A movie made today may actually show Fu Manchu as a freedom fighter. ``` As for Sax Rohmer being a hack…well, it was good enough for Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens.