Further to https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/12/some-chinese-practices-11-common-link.html, one can also end up in the opposite direction mentioning a name -- if it's an enemy's name.
I used to know a mainland Chinese woman who was here to keep her daughter company while the latter was doing her music degree at the RAM (Royal Academy of Music, near Baker Street).
One day, we were in one of the Chinese supermarkets in Chinatown and she wanted to buy some pork for dinner. She introduced me to the woman at the meat counter, her ex-neighbour in Shenyang (N.E.China), Yao Li.
Fast forward to a bit later. The wife of my ex-classmate at RI (Raffles Institution) was in London visiting her daughter who was studying here. The wife said she wanted to buy some pork for dinner, so I took her to that supermarket.
(Just as an aside: numerous Chinese people, particularly mainland Chinese people, have said to me that the pork bought in the UK doesn't taste like how it tastes in the East because, according to them, they don't let off the blood [放血 / fàng xiě] properly here. Perhaps a lot of Chinese people here buy their meat, especially pork, from Chinese supermarkets because the meat is processed the way the Chinese like it, like having the blood let off properly [whatever "properly" means]. They certainly sell cuts favoured by the Chinese that don't feature that commonly in Western cooking, e.g., spare ribs, and pork skin.)
At the meat counter, my RI classmate's wife was trying to decide which kind of pork to get (so she kept the man waiting), asking questions about this and that (which irritated the man further).
While she was weighing up the options, I thought I'd make idle conversation with the man by asking if Yao Li was in that day. Nope, was the answer.
My friend's wife eventually went for a particular piece of pork. The man picked it up in his hand to weigh it for the price, at which point my friend's wife asked if he could cut it into smaller pieces for her. He then said, in a snarl, gritting his teeth, 不卖! / bù mài / "not sell!", and tossed it back into the pile.
My Singapore friend's wife and I left the supermarket to go and buy her pork elsewhere.
I'd put it down to it being default behaviour (especially by Chinese people from particular areas -- they come across as brusque, aggressive, unfriendly), having seen it so many times myself: in Singapore and Malaysia during my younger days there, in Taiwan in the mid-70s and late 90s, here in London, in Hong Kong and on mainland China.
When I told the story to my mainland friend, however, she traced it back to my having mentioned the wrong name to the wrong person: that meat counter worker and Yao Li didn't get on at all. By asking him if she was in that day, I was giving him the impression that I was her friend. His enemy's friend was, therefore, also his enemy. (By being with me, my Singapore classmate's poor wife got caught up in all this as well, as an unwitting party.)
A week or so later, I was meeting my mainland friend outside the supermarket before lunching at one of the restaurants. Standing next to her was the meat counter man -- she'd obviously taken him aside to tick him off for being horrible to me so unfairly. She tried to get me to join them, but I stood to one side at a distance, waiting for her to come over to me. He did look a bit sheepish, I thought.
Yet another week or so later, my friend handed me a sweater -- from her friend Yao Li. I'd only met her briefly across the meat counter once before, just long enough to say hello, no more, so the sweater was obviously her way of apologising to me for having got the brunt of his bile on her account. There was no way I was allowed to refuse to accept the sweater (which I still have, to this day).
What a complicated web of relations we humans spin around us!
(London, c.early 2000)
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