I’ve always taken it for granted that their using western names was for that purpose: that, and because those would be easier to remember. There are a lot of homonyms in the language; Kevin says the Chinese don’t even do puns, because their everyday lives are crammed full of words that sound alike. (sroni once told me that ma, said five or six times with different tones, constitutes an intelligible sentence in Mandarin.)

As for the late meal … yeah. We’ll just have to make up for it some other way in the next few days, because there was no recovering that.