Tiger Year in China

I think experiencing Chinese New Year in China should be on every one of those "Things you should do before you die" lists. I couldn't sleep for DAYS because of all the fireworks going off; it was Silvester in Leipzig times a bazillion. No one does dangerous illegal fireworks like the Chinese! :)

Here's hoping for a grrrrrr-eat Tiger year! :)

A Chang, By Any Other Name

As Betsy Brown so respectfully observed last year , memorizing and differentiating between Chinese names is, for the average foreigner, slightly more difficult than growing an extra toe. Many Chinese people therefore choose to adopt Western-friendly names when dealing with expatriates. This is sort of like when my preschool teacher would let us call him ‘Mr.Y’ because ‘Yasselski’ was too much for our little minds to handle.

Many Chinese people exasperatedly choose the simplest name they can come up with—“Just call me Bill.” Combined with the relative uniformity of Chinese surnames, this only serves to perpetuate the confusion; for instance, my office has four Bill Chens, three Wendy Wangs, and no way to distinguish between them on paper.

Others seem to put more thought, creativity, and enthusiasm into picking their English names. I can go to lunch with Apple and Teacup, the receptionists, before heading to a meeting with Handsome, Sky, and Twinkle. Sawyer, my cubicle-buddy, named himself after a character on ‘Lost.’

I met a girl at a party who introduced herself as “Foot” because her Chinese name is “Fu Te.”

And a guy named Lebron at a cafe.

In a way, I’m jealous of my coworkers’ opportunity to name themselves. Choosing a name, to me, seems a powerful statement and a serious business. It took me over a month of agonizing before I created my UM uniqname.

I’d like to think that if I had a chance to name myself, I would choose something delightfully ridiculous—Question Chang, Leipzig Chang (People do cities, right?), Rainbow City Sparkle Chang. ‘Connie’ makes me think of an awkwardly overweight housewife in the 1920s. My parents don’t even really like it; they only thought it was a perfect fit because my Grandfather named me ‘Kang-yi' in Chinese--I suppose I should really just consider myself lucky that he didn't choose ‘Fu Te.’

A (New) New Start

In the past few years, I’ve sporadically maintained and discarded multiple Xangas, Livejournals, and Blogspots. The problem is always that after many meandering entries, I inevitably ask myself, But what’s the focus here? Where is this all leading? The problem is, I have no idea. The problem is that I’ve had the concept of PLOT hammered in by seventeen years of English class.


This entry, the first one, is of course exposition. But where is the excitement? I will think impatiently after a few months. It can’t possibly be stuck in rising action forever, I won’t allow it. And so after a few half hearted attempts at a Kiss of Life— forced entries that scream, “HEY look here at how grippingly climactic I am!”—the blog is discarded and added to my growing graveyard of failed online journals.

Then a new blog is born, and I always think that THIS is the one. This one will have climax! climax! climax! and everyone will love reading about my exciting not-at-all-dull life.

(Pictured below: Typically the most exciting moment of my day.)

In the end, of course, I am the only one reading and re-reading my entries, congratulating myself on my own cleverness. To myself, I say: go out and get a life, please. To others: Thank you for enabling my self-indulgence—this time I’m going to try and make it to the peak.