Yang Fan

yangfan, originally uploaded by dadapunk80.

This is my new Chinese name: Yang Fan.

The first character, Yang, was easy to choose. It's my mother's surname. Choosing the second character, however, was not so easy. My first Chinese name was given to me by my first boss. It was Mei Le which is a horrible name that means "beautiful and happy." My university students told me it sounded like a farmer's daughter's name (and in China, being a farmer is exceptionally bad socially [so much for socialism]). My second Chinese name was Hong Lian. A Chinese man I sat next to at a football match gave it to me. Hong means "red" and Lian was taken from the second character in the name of the city I was living in, Da Lian. I was also told by my students that Hong Lian was too farmerish, though better than Mei Le. My third Chinese name was assigned to me by the mother of a friend and that was Hai Lan. This means "sea blue." Also farmerish, apparently, and I never really took to it.

Finding the Chinese people around me inadequate in their ability to give me a name, I took the task upon myself and, like many Chinese in search of an English name, I went into the dictionary.

Most Chinese words or concepts have a few characters, so I started with words starting with Yang (second tone), a very common Chinese surname that means "poplar." I didn't find anything I liked, but the next character listed, also Yang in the second tone, can be written with Fan (first tone), which means "sail," to mean "hoist the sails" or "set sail." This I liked, but I didn't like the idea of having the first name "sail." I continued for other characters for Fan in the first tone and found what you see in the picture. This Fan means "to have an altogether different flavor."

So there we have it: "poplar of an altogether different flavor," but when said together I'm to "set sail."

The name has since been approved by those around me to a good and very Chinese sounding name. One of my private students, a very hip 15-year-old girl, even told me it was cool and that the wife of a nobel prize winner at Tsinghua University (the MIT of China) has the same name.

This is Yang Fan, signing off...

DAMMIT!

humidifier, originally uploaded by dadapunk80.

I was half way through a post about my shitty day yesterday and I lost it! Now I'm too irritated to start over.

The rant, in a nutshell, is that I hate China. Or at least I did yesterday. I got sick, Chinese doctors are incompetent and someone in the hospital nicked my fucking cell phone. (May the motherfucker who has it now not know enough English to change the functions over to Chinese!)

Apart from this battle with something nasty that has affected, at different times, my throat, nose, head and bowels, things are pretty good. I work seven days a week and I'm pulling in decent money. (I'm working like a machine now, but counting the days until my contract is up...) I got a membership to the local gym and up until fight with the flu (or whatever it is) I had been swimming nearly everyday.

This silly looking thing (the photo) is the latest addition to my family of toys for hypochondriacs. It's a humidifier and it keeps my air purifier company.