Back from China

Hello! Have you all missed me? I meant to write earlier but my latest trip to China turned out to be busier than I was able to handle. Over the next several posts, I'll chronicle my latest trip, but Hello! Have you all missed me? I meant to write earlier but my latest trip to China turned out to be busier than I was able to handle. Over the next several posts, I'll chronicle my latest trip, but I haven't gotten around to putting up all of the photos from the trip just yet, so first, I'll direct you all to my Wedding Photo Album. For those of you who don't know, Cherrie and I have actually been married for more than three years, but we never had a formal reception with our relatives until this past trip to China. While we were there, we went ahead and had this photo shoot done by Nong Nong Wedding Photo company, a Taiwan-based photo studio specializing in wedding and other glamour photos. Essentially, these Taiwanese photo studio companies put together high production value photo albums at reasonably low prices. All of the photos in the album were put together in two very nice physical photo albums that are divided into themes based on what clothes we had on. It's too bad I don't have a soft copy of the final production, because it makes the photos that much more beautiful! Check out the samples below, then click any of the links to visit the Wedding Photo Album!

What's in a Name?

I have a friend from college named Jeevan. He was born in the United Arab Emirates, but is Indian by descent. He moved to the U.S. for his college education, and has been in the States ever since. However, he's always had strong viewpoints on everything, and has always thoroughly enjoyed pressing them upon you for the sake of arguing with you. It's usually some kind of ridiculous what-if topic such as who I would support in a war between the U.S. and Taiwan, or some sort of criticism of American culture, or Chinese culture, or whatever it is to get a rise out of whomever he's talking to. It's pretty annoying, but sometimes, I get a kick out of these discussions, and sometimes they get me to thinking a bit as well.

A few days ago, we raised one that got me to thinking a bit. Jeeves started his conversation the only way he knew how - very non-PC and optimized for maximum shock value. The kind that usually elicits a response along the lines of "How could you say something like that?" Basically, he accused Chinese people as not retaining their culture as strongly as Indian people do. Being used to it, I didn't bother to fight with him, but I was curious now, so I asked him to elaborate. Of course, he had it all planned out, as usual.

It turns out that Jeevan was citing the habit of many Chinese people to give themselves English names. It's true. I myself am one such example, although my parents gave me my English name. But aside from me, I can think of countless examples of Chinese people with English aliases, and many of the prominent ones as well. Jackie Chan, for example. Andy Lau. Crystal Liu. Vivian Hsu. An interesting side note on Vivian - Vivian Hsu is a somewhat famous singer/model in Taiwan, but I recently found out that my youngest cousin in Taiwan is also called Vivian Hsu... why are so many Asian girls called Vivian? And so many Asian guys are called Jason, or Brian, or Nicholas. Kind of weird, I wonder if there is a list of most common English names for Chinese people on the Internet somewhere!

However, it's true that few Indian people I know have an English name in addition to their Indian name. I never really gave it that much thought, to be honest. In any case, I don't remember how the rest of the conversation went, but it did get me to think about why it is that we Chinese people do that, and why Indian people don't. I brought the issue up to Nick at work, and he provided a pretty good theory, I thought. Nick commented on how the mass immigration of Chinese people to America occurred over a hundred years ago, well before there was much Indian immigration to America at all. He mentioned how, when his grandfather came to America from Poland, his lengthy Polish surname was insensitively truncated by immigrations officers in America, and extrapolated that, if even in the 30s and 40s, America was so intolerant to foreign, difficult to pronounce names, then in the 1800s, Chinese names were probably virtually unacceptable. Racism towards "Chinamen" probably did have a hand in encouraging many Chinese to adopt more English names in their early efforts to live in America, and the practice of using English names has just carried on ever since. Indian immigrants, in contrast, did not really appear en masse until the 70s and 80s, when tolerance was much improved, and in addition, many of them immigrated to the States in white collar positions such as doctors and spoke pretty decent English, thus probably not being as inclined to feel the need for an English name in order to adapt to American society.

Anyhow, I thought that was an interesting theory. What do you think?

The Legend of Zelda Live Action Film Trailer!

This was actually an April Fool's joke by the people at IGN.com.

I seriously would have paid good money to see this, the trailer was very well done.