Wow! I got a sensational reponse to my pinyin puzzle in yesterday’s diary —way better than I normally get for a math puzzle. One or more of the following things must be true:

—-ABC trumps 123: Far more people are interested in words than in numbers.

—-Be ready for the 21st century superpower: A lot of people are trying to learn Chinese.

—-Leading indicator: The U.S. economy has slowed dramatically this past month, leaving millions of desk jockeys with spare time on their hands.

Anyway, here’s the solution.

1-l, 2-dd, 3-bb, 4-y, 5-i, 6-w, 7-m, 8-aa, 9-o, 10-d, 11-b, 12-cc, 13–g, 14-j, 15-n, 16-v, 17-f, 18-t, 19-k, 20-e, 21-q, 22-s, 23-c, 24-a, 25-z, 26-r, 27-h, 28-u, 29-p, 30-x.

My personal favorite is “Xiaobona” for G.B. Shaw. You put the surname first, Chinese-style, and pick a suitable-sounding character: “xiao” sounds close to “shao.” Then you drop the George (? don’t ask me) and Sinicize the Bernard to “bona” (sounds like “buh-nah”).

Shaw visited China in the thirties–a big bonding issue in Sino-Hibernian relations. He met Lu Xun, the Chinese Orwell. I had this to say about the meeting, in a review I did of Harriet Sergeant’s book about Shanghai:

“The only resident of the period likely to be remembered a thousand years on was the writer Lu Xun. East met West with perfect mutual incomprehension in 1933, when Lu called on George Bernard Shaw during the latter’s visit to Shanghai. Miss Sergeant’s coverage of the encounter places the participants very nicely: the one a self-indulgent old gasbag from a smug, safe country, playing at social rebellion, the other a saint and a hero– the pride of his race and paragon of his craft– for whom the game was all too real.”

The late British Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was a great “friend of the Chinese people” (i.e. of the commies–he went over & patted them on the back after the Tiananmen Square massacre, which was just the kind of thing he would have liked to do to his own countrymen) got his last name transcribed into Chinese as “Xisi” (pronounced “Shee-sz”). Expat wags used to refer to him as “Ksissy.”