priscimon blog

My sleep pattern is wrecked. I go to bed at around 2 a.m. most days, except when my body crashes and forces me to an early sleep. I then have a very good rest, but only to recover for more 2 a.m. bedtimes. In short, it swings from one extreme to the other.

Now, my employer plans to have us back in offices in October. Undoubtedly, this will be difficult for many of us who will have to swap from-bed-to-zoom-in-10-minutes for early pre-COVID wake-up alarms and hour-long commutes to actual offices. Add the equally tedious return journeys, busy roads, and crowded public transport, and it goes from a difficult to a depressing outlook.

My colleagues and I are lucky, though. In 2019 we started the company’s new Way of Working (WOW) that allows employees to work remotely for up to three days of each week, with the condition that those days not be fixed. As software developers, my team need fewer face-to-face meetings than other client-facing teams in the company and have, therefore, been able to relax this rule. Now that almost two years of ‘COVID Way of Working’ prove that people can be productive working from home, it will be interesting to see how WOW evolves.

I was added to an alumni WhatsApp group and got to talk to my old high-school (or college) friends again. It’s interesting to see that after 27 years, the same cliques exist, the same people monopolise the conversation, and there are the same quiet ones.

There’s also the dichotomy of the friends who live in Mauritius and those who are abroad. The first group talk about looking for a way out, and the second, a mind to return to Mauritius. The first group also appear to give a lot of importance to financial stability while the second wish for quiet and enjoyment. Of course, many more are content with their situations and express no desire for change.

I am not sure what to make of it, but it is an intriguing observation.

Many years ago Ms Jiang, our Mandarin teacher, asked us for our names, went away for a few days, and came back with the Chinese equivalents. For a long time I wondered how she managed to do that, given that the names on our official documents are approximate English transliterations of the Chinese originals at best. I even suspected that she had just made up new names for us.

After some research, I can confirm that the family (or clan) name is actually Xiong. It means ‘bear’ and is derived from a folk hero’s name. Exactly what charming Ms Jiang told us. She also said that my Chinese given name means ‘Prosperous Flower’. I want to believe that my memory fails me on this one.

My surname, like those of many Sino-Mauritians, has three parts: a botched anglicisation of the above and my father’s given name in two words. Which gives me a full name with seven parts: J E F H Y T Y, where ‘J E’ is my Christian name, ‘F H’ is my Chinese given name transliterated from Hakka, the first ‘Y’ is the family name, and ‘T Y’ is my father’s given name. Filling official paper forms with these small boxes for letters is always fun.