Ronny Chieng Wants Marvel to Change Shang-Chi’s Chinese Character Name for a Great Reason
By Bryan Ke
Many Asian fans are apparently not so thrilled after learning that Shang-Chi’s Chinese characters in the comics have a very odd English translation, one that feels completely unfit for a superhero.
Australian-Malaysian actor and comedian, Ronny Chieng, who played Edison “Eddie” Cheng in “Crazy Rich Asians,” took to Twitter to make his suggestion in changing Shang-Chi’s Chinese characters (上氣), which Marvel apparently believed to mean “Rising Spirit.”
However, it appears these characters are read as “Upper Air,” which is not exactly a great superhero name to boot. So instead, Chieng made a suggestion to the multi-billion dollar giant to call the martial artist superhero “神奇” (Shen Qi).
The 33-year-old actor then explained that this character means “miraculous” and also keeps roughly the same as the hero’s English version name.
Furthermore, the Shen 神 in his name literally means God, “and in context means ‘God-like,’ which further adds to the super hero mystique of this name,” Chieng said in the follow up tweet.
Since the Chinese characters are somewhat close to the hero’s name, Chieng said that Marvel could still get away with calling him Shang-Chi.
“Just to clarify I think you can get away with still calling him ‘Shang-Chi’ in English but just making the Chinese origin of his name 神奇 (Shen Qi) ‘Miraculous’ instead of ‘Rising Spirit,’” he said in another tweet.
After Chieng posted this, some fans couldn’t help but poke fun at the Chinese character translation.
Featured image via Instagram / ronnychieng
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