I did not mention about a very weird yet funny conversation me and SoGua had with one of the Hotel staffs at Ibis who is a Parisian himself. It all started with a simple fix that Sogua had to make on a Saturday night after he was informed he had to stay for another week. He was, of course, shocked to find out his company did not make any necessary arrangements with the Hotel to extend his stay. Luckily, he checked and found out and quickly make payments using his own credit card so he wouldn’t be sleeping in the streets the following night.

You see, Sogua’s a 100% traditional chinese man that believes Chinese people should sign off their names in Chinese characters and not alphabetics because Chinese names are simply in chinese. So you could imagine the look on that Parisian’s face when he saw a scribble on the credit card receipt.

“May I know where’s your signature?”, asked the Parisian

“Here,” Sogua pointed at the signature

Puzzled, the Parisian looked at the paper and looked at the computer screen again “Your name is So Gua?”

“Yes…”

“And this is your name? Where’s the S-O-G-U-A?”, the doubful Parisian asked

“Oh, this is not my full name. Just the GUA word”

“So where’s the G.U.A?”, the Parisian asked again

“This is a chinese character, so this chinese character represents the Gua word”

“Ha? So Chinese characters have no ABCs?”

“No, they have their own set of characters.”

“And how many characters does a Chinese Language have?”

“Almost more than 5000 characters!”

“OH!!!! And I thought French is a complicated language! So which country uses this language? Japan?”

“No, but many like Hong Kong, Taiwan etc …”

It was then I chripped in that we are not Chinese but Malaysians. The last time I was mistaken for a Korean / Japanese. I really wonder the Europeans always mistaken us like how we always mistaken them between them and the Americans.