Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

I used to be miffed whenever I heard those who do not come from an English-speaking background get English names. When I worked in an internship years ago in China, I was disgusted that my Chinese colleagues would not call me by my name simply because I did not have an English one. They would address each other by their English names before returning to their Chinese conversations. I found the act highly superficial: having English names did not automatically make them proficient in English, just as their choice of not addressing my Chinese name did not make me less international than they are.

I monitor the viewer stats of this blog from time to time. In recent months, the blog stats have shown some suspicious stats that make me worried about where and how the blog is viewed. Whereas individual blog posts have no more than 20 pageviews each in total in the months after publication, sometimes the blog itself registers more than 500 views in a single day, all coming from Hong Kong, mainland China, Ireland, and Singapore, none of which match my traditional viewership in the past years, the vast majority of which originates in the US, combined with the foreign population in Japan.