h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As someone who is half Chinese and half English, with a Chinese and an English name, I see what you mean. There is a bizarre discrepancy in tastes between East and West in general, so why, I suppose, should names be any different? I was brought up in the UK, so I have a Western perspective on things, but many of my cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles have old-fashioned or even outlandish Western names. When I tell people I've visited Doris and Mimi, I get strange looks. Hell, at least they're not boring and unoriginal. The next generation seem less inclined to have anything other than Chinese names, so maybe it's just as well. No, by the way, my name is just fine, thank you.

As an English teacher at one of Hong Kong's unis, I thought I'd heard
them all - for example I have taught chaps called Algebra or Water,
but a colleague with a class of engineers reports that they have taken
on the names of their former English teachers.So there's a
basketball-playing Mr Wu wandering round Kowloon Tong
called after me- Priscilla

When I was working in Hong Kong I encountered the following

Vagina Wu (Seriously! she tried to get a job at Merrill Lynch but was refused as her name might tarnish their image)
Bum Suk Wong (HK City University)
Bambooplum Chen (Price Waterhouse Taiwan)
King Chan (another Merrill Lynch one)

More classic Hong Kong names:

Silence Ng (Immigration officer)

Fanny Chu (a very important person at Star TV)

Living in Asia, in Taiwan, for now 7 years, I think I can contribute to that list of "the strangest English names in the Chinese world"...

I have a female coworker whose English name is Swallow... She might have thought that it is nice to just translate the meaning of one part of her Chinese name, taking the name of a bird, but it never occurred to her that the same word is also a verb that might not be a suitable name for a lady...

I once met a guy who had the name "Goodstuff" printed on his business card. As I asked him "why?", his answer was "why not ?". Indeed.

In the recent years, fancy car names (Infinity, and the like) seems to have inspired many adopted English names.

Sometimes, the name was given by an English teacher, who had to be creative enough to find 100 different names for each of his students ! Can't blame him/her if (s)he had to recycle gran'ma's middle name !

In other cases, people just pick a word that sounds good, not always knowing what it means... Hence "Vagina", "Swallow", and the like !

A quite irritating phenomenon (to me) is the consistent similarity between so many female names around here : half my female coworkers have a name that goes ..A..Y, or ..A..IE : Amy, Dabbie, Fanny, Marcy, Manny, Mandy, Cathy, Candy, etc.

But then again, who am I to say anything ?
When I arrived here, I had to get a Chinese name, and I picked one that is about one or two centuries old, and very, very local... Many people are surprised to see me, if and when they had heard my Chinese name before, expecting to see an old taiwanese farmer in traditional outfit, pulling a water bull with a straw rope !

Vincent,
a.k.a. Lin WanSong (!)