Here is my assigned Chinese name in Chinese characters. It is To2ng Le3i. Those numbers right after the “o” and the “e” indicate a tone mark. Since you probably have no idea what those are, don’t worry about it. Tong Lei is Pinyin, the romanization of the pronunciation of the Chinese characters. Tong is just a family surname, no meaning. Lei means high as in social status, honor etc, and big as in great person/influential people. Not much correlation to me, but thats ok. Later, I think, after I am well into Chinese and really have a good grip on the language and culture, I can change my name. Many people do that. By the way, I wrote that vertically, but more and more Chinese people write horizontally, from left to write, just like us. Often if something is written vertically it is for traditional, artistic, or literature reasons.