Though I've lived in Taiwan, off and on, for about five years, I'm ashamed to say that my command of the language is atrocious. This isn't because I'm a dolt; I know I'd be conversing smoothly in French or Italian if fate had placed me in one of those countries. Unfortunately, as a tonal language, Mandarin is notoriously difficult for foreigners to pronounce (and hear). As I'm essentially tone deaf, I have a one-in-four chance of getting the meaning of any given word right. This often leads to confusion, and sometimes mortification. Just one example: The sentence “Wo gan mao” (I've caught a cold), with a slight change in two tones, becomes “Wo gan mao” (I f*ck cats).

Westerners like me  generally mangle Chinese names, which is why many Chinese use a Western name when dealing with foreigners. Japanese, not being tonal, doesn't have this problem; most of us can can easily navigate our way through a crowd of Keikos and Hanas and Satoshis. Thus, we rarely meet (in Japan, anyway) a Bob Fujimori or an Emily Honda. On the other hand, Taiwan and China are full of Sally Wangs, Frank Chens and Betty Laos. Unfortunately, it doesn't always stop there.

During my stints of university work in Taipei, I've met Bear, Snake, Turtle, Pineapple, Pumpkin, Vanilla, Cactus, Frodo, Gandalf, Obiwan, Toy, Zombie, and others, no doubt equally creative, that I've forgotten. One girl, a diminutive, shy waif, wanted to be called Elephant. In the same class, there was a girl named Evil. This did make it rather easy to remember names, since Evil happened to sit next to Angel. (A couple of semesters later, Evil turned up pregnant, which led to plenty of faculty-lounge jokes about the Spawn of Evil.)

Other names are actually proper names—that is, they show up on the baby name websites--but choosing them ignores some basic cultural issues that might escape non-Westerners. There are excellent reasons why Adolph is not a popular name. Likewise Kermit, Gaylord, and Rastus.

As bad as these are, at least they're self-inflicted. When parents do it to an innocent baby, it achieves a whole other level of inanity. A friend of my wife--an intelligent, generally sensible, apparently sane fellow--has just given his newborn daughter the Western name Pita.

Pita. It's a kind of food. A bread. Worse yet, as a name for a girl, it's a bread that gets stuffed with meat. Lots of people here in Taiwan would say this just shows that I'm a typically sex-obsessed, dirty-minded Western barbarian. OK, I am. But consider that you're sending your daughter out into a world crawling with sex-obsessed, dirty-minded Western barbarians before you give her the name Swallow. Yes, I know, it's a kind of bird. So is a tit.

I could go on (and on), but that's all for today.  I have to get to my meeting with Destiny.