The Name Game

The name of a person is a very important part of his identity.

However the longer you know a person, the less his/her name strikes you as a specific trait or a characteristic. Over time a familiar persons name jsut blends in with the general persona, and seems to have no special association to it at all.

But what happens if this person decides to change his/her name?

Exactly thats what I´m facing at the moment, as my girlfriend of two years is currently deciding by what name she will go by in the future.

You should know that my girlfriend is from Hong Kong, where people have two official names, a three part Chinese name (eg. Kwok Wing Li) and an english first name. This english first name can be changed at will by the person, and there are no limits set. So it often happens that a Hong Kong student will be called by his Chan Yat Wai by his friends and relatives, but will be introduced to you, a foreigner, as Peter Chan. Some people also jsut use their english names, while others dont have one.

Side effects of this policy are:

1. People change their name weekly.

2. A lot of people have the same names as their favorite singers/actors.

3. Names like Mushroom, Rainbow, Cloudy are nothing out of the ordinary, as students often pick their names out of english textbooks.

But to me as a westerner, who has always called everyone by his english name, I have nothing to fall back on. It would be weird calling her by her chinese name, but even weirder to call her by her new name for some reason.

I guess she has to live with the fact that she will forever be called by the name in wich I fell in love as part of her persona.

A Prussian Slip

There was a saying about germans, which became popular durin napoleons better days:

The french own the land, the british own the sea, and the germans, the germans own the clouds

During this time, germans masters created the most beautiful pieces of music ever known to humankind and german poets were able to bring the clumsy and dry german language to a beauty previously unknown.

Nowadays however, germans excell mostly in another discipline:

Bureaucracy.

How efficient we bury any human aspect under paper became clear to me when I heard this story from my mum:
The mother of a friend of my mum, let´s call her Mrs.P, went to hopital and fell into a deep coma. Two weeks later, she died.

A week after that the daughter recieved a letter from the hospital.

It was a bill for two weeks of cantine food, around 13 Euro per day.

The daughter then called the hospital to explain that her mother never ate in the cantine. The lady from the hospital office then explained that Mrs.P had subscribed to the cantine upon arriving in hospital, and during her stay has never called the office to unsubscribe...