UFR: Midnight bowler

In all the exhaustion and bleariness, I forgot to mention a passing diversion from the World Series Game That Would Not Die. The boisterous gentlemen at the next table brought my attention to some street theatre: Through the front window of Big Chicks, we saw a skinny, dishelved woman who would stoop over, make a sweeping motion, straighten up, walk a few more paces, and repeat the sequence. Was she dancing? I happened to step outside for some fresh air, so I got to examine her a bit longer and came to the conclusion that she was going through all the motions of bowling with a phantom ball. I announced this to the others.

A bit later, she came by again, now moving from north to south. "See, she's bowling," I said. The doorman heard me and replied, "We call her the 'Bowler of the Night'?" Was he was just pulling my leg? We were all pretty punchy by that hour. But then one of the gentlemen pointed out a detail I'd missed. "She's shooting craps! See how she's shaking her hand?" Bowling or craps? Or are we all mistaken?

I don't even know who you are anymore!

As we learned recently in Chinese class, you can't bank in Taiwan without a name seal. A signed check simply can't be cashed without first affixing one's personal chop. So when monshu was teaching English there, back in another age, he had a professional seal carver make him one. The man asked him what his name meant and monshu told him "wry or broken mouth". Oh, no, that won't do! So he chose a more auspicious name based chiefly on phonetic resemblance.

Flash forward a couple decades to the early years of our relationship. monshu shows me the seal and tells me the story. The calligraphy is lovely, done in an ornate version of large seal script. I can't read it, so I ask him to tell me what it says. But he doesn't remember and it's not written down anywhere. A bit later, I decide to have it decoded so I can use the name in a gift. I slip it into my pocket and secretly show it to the head of the East Asian Library. A week or so later, she pulls out some photocopied pages from a seal-character dictionary tells me she's found a match: 康儒.

Flash forward to the present day. I stop by to pick up a few items before leaving for STL in the morning. monshu pulls out the new name seal he's had commissioned, a four character expansion of his name (i.e. "Kang Ru's seal") on a beautiful chicken-blood stone. He points to the impression in red ink on a piece of paper. "There's my new seal and there's my old one."

They don't match.

Allowing for the slightly different styles, the surnames look identical, so it's all the odder that the characters for the given name clash. They don't have remotely the same number of strokes. When I draw his attention to this, he points out that he sent the artist the same name we've been using for him for years. "I think we must've gotten your name wrong all those years ago," I tell him and set to work with the reference materials handy. Almost an hour later, I believe I have a better candidate so I Google it and find it's a conventional transcription of his particular surname. 康儒 is really 康培!

There's no question of going back to that now. The Chinese calligrapher we befriended liked 康儒 so much he wrote a poem based on it! Now that he's got a newer, more valuable chop the old plastic one can be permanently relegated to the memento drawer and we shall never speak of it again! It's actually fortunate, I told him: We've replaced a generic transcription with something unique (or at least much more unusual)--albeit by error and accident. I changed Chinese surnames twice before settling on one that I really like and that fits me.