Wednesday, December 31, 2014

New year‘s revel

It's about to be new year's! I'm not prepared...! What to say?
Luckily one of my friends has shown a way. As described in her occasional blog (painstakingly and haltingly translated by yours truly), she was looking for a way to formulate her good wishes to her friends at new year's when our old friend 缘分 yuanfen (at one point she even calls it heaven-sent 天意缘分 yuanfen) stepped in. Visiting her daughter in Hong Kong she'd just stepped out to get some breakfast when she happened to see an old friend. Happy coincidence! Since it was just a fleeting visit she hadn't told him she was going to be there, and he was just on his way out of town, too! But they were able to have a quick chat in which who should come up but yours truly (the friend was my host for the HKU talk) and his enthusiasm for the concept of yuanfen in particular and how, enchanted by his study of Chinese, he changed his WeChat name to luo suiyuan 罗随缘?

I guess I forgot to report that here! Luo 罗's been part of my Chinese name through all its permutations, a standard phonetic rendering of la/ra/lo/ro, but the other part's new. I told you about how suiyuan 随缘 found me about a month ago but not how I decided to incorporate it in my WeChat nickname. (That actually only happened two weeks ago.) Well, it's come to seem that - in this year, if not more generally - I really am doing a sort of participant observation of the world of yuan, going where 缘/karma/fate/chance leads (随缘). So luo suiyuan it is!

These yuan 缘 terms have a busy cluster of meanings, from the metaphysical to the colloquial, earnest to ironic, and none more than suiyuan. When I put my friend's text into google translate (don't think it was just me and my Pleco dictionary!) it translated 罗随缘 back as Luo revel. May all have much to revel in in the new year! 祝咱们新年快乐!