Brunch

A pleasant morning, having brunch with Maitreyi and the Woodland Creature, the two people I shall most miss in KL. We talked about Chinese and I tried to understand something I’ve long wondered about, ie whether to a native Chinese speaker fán sounds more similar to fàn or to fén, but couldn’t really get a sense of it. We did talk about Chinese naming, though: one was unusually, for a Hokkien of the period, named in Pinyin rather than Hokkien though the characters are the same. The real name is in the character; indeed when that person’s name was changed in childhood on advice of an astrologer, the new name was similar in pronunciation but the crucial difference was in how it was written. Very recently, the name was changed back to the original, and for the first time in decades, it felt right.