Aren’t the Chinese funny? I don’t know if you are aware of the Chinese practice of taking on odd ‘western’ names when dealing with foreigners. You see, names like Xiao-Xou are awkward to pronounce for us, and perhaps because of this (or perhaps because they just want to be cool) Chinese people choose alternative names for dealing with us whities. In fact some people don’t get to choose, as we have actually seen happen a superior assigns someone to work on a project, needs a name and simply says “you look like Eric, we’ll call you Eric from now on”. So often you meet Chinese people like Bob Liu-Chien, Jack Zhou or Theodore Xu-Gao, but often you encounter some pretty odd name choices. Try these on for size, over the past year I have met people called Hunter, Lightning, Nightfish, Candy and Lucky. So half the time it feels like i’m working with Gladiators, super heroes, prostitutes and collies! Very odd practice, not at all nice, and regular Chinese names are so nice anyway!
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