Madness In The Middle Kingdom

In case you didn’t know my Chinese name is Dalong whose two characters (- da and - long) mean simply Big Dragon. Yeah .. laugh it up! In China it is common to have animal names as your family names or given names in fact my wife’s family name is Ma which means horse (if said in the 3rd tone). I was given this name not long after I arrived in August 2000 by a computer salesman whose English name is Tom. Tom is of course Chinese and when he tried to pronounce my name Darren he had difficulty getting the r sound correct and my name came out as Da Len. He then decided it would be easier for me if I had a Chinese name and he though the best and closest match was Da Long which is actually somewhat common here. Unlike traditional Chinese names I have not taken a surname and thus remain in the land of one name people (such as Elvis, Cher, Prince et al.). Below is a picture of the characters of my name if they were written in traditional script (like they use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas like in Vancouver). The characters given above are the simplified script which is used in mainland China (notice da is the same but the simplified long is much easier to write).