Land of Milk and Honey

Letter from Hong Kong...

At the McDonald’s outlet that I turn to for a bite on the go, there’s a cheery young girl at the counter. Her distinctive name elevates her beyond the McJob nature of her work. She’s called, somewhat appropriately, Milk Fat, and she displays her name on her chest as if it’s a war-trophy!

Comical as it sounds, it isn’t quite the most oddball name I’ve encountered in Hong Kong. A former Singapore beauty queen who has played some gratuitously sexy roles in Hong Kong films, answers to the English name of Alien Sun. And long-time residents with an interesting choice of reading material recall that a porn magazine that has long folded up used to have an artist called – I kid you not – Pubic Ha!

Anyone who’s been in Hong Kong long enough will have their own compilation of outrageously (but unintentionally) hilarious English names that parents in this erstwhile British colony have anointed their children with. And from time to time, we share the fruits of our search for nomenclatural hilarity.

Thus it is that my life has been enriched by an office secretary in a consulting firm called Nausea Yip and a travel agent named Honey Chan. Among other honourable mentions: Sincerely Hu, Busy Wong, Destiny Chu. But the winners by a long mile are sisters Chlorophyll Yip and Photosynthesis Yip. (Evidently, their father was a botanist with an admirable sense of humour.)

When two salesmen begin hardselling the merits of a boutique yoga club and gave their names as Tom and Jerry, I suppose anyone with even a passing familiarity with cat-and-mouse games would have been on guard. But two elderly sisters in Hong Kong, who weren’t sufficiently alert to the comical nature of the salesmen’s names, signed on, only to find themselves engaged in a dogfight with the club, which refused to honour the commitments that Tom and Jerry had made. Matters were subsequently resolved happily.

A Hong Kong-born person of Indian origin, who speaks fluent Cantonese, is something of a star in Hong Kong, having performed in comic tele-serials and cookery shows. Gill Mohindepaul Singh used to work in the Hong Kong Correctional Services for more than 10 years, but made the most of his 15 minutes of fame when he won a talent contest. He’s given himself a Chinese name — Q Bo Bo — and has even performed alongside Jackie Chan in the comedy film Rob-B-Hood.