For the living, numbers that sound like lucky words are in great demand. Some people are willing to go to great lengths to secure lucky house numbers, license plates, and cell-phone numbers. The reverse is true, and sometimes a certain house number, like twenty-four or forty-two (which sounds like “you die” in both Chinese and Japanese), is worth avoiding in Asia simply because you may have a hard time reselling the property!
Interestingly, the number five is both lucky and unlucky, as it is a homophone for “negative/not.” So a lucky number eight, which sounds like “fortune” becomes less desirable in combination with five as fifty-eight sounds like “no fortune.” Similarly, an unlucky number can be flipped, so fifty-four sounds like “won’t die.”
ROMANIZATION OF NAMES
In keeping with the colonial era, I’ve used older variants of place names, for example, “Korinchi” and “Tientsin” rather than modern-day Kerinci and Tianjin. Chinese personal names at the time were phonetically spelled, often at the discretion of whoever the registry clerk was, and also varied by dialect. Cantonese was and still is the dominant Chinese dialect in the Ipoh area, though Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Hainanese, etc., are also spoken. Since Malaysia is a multicultural society, most people can speak a few languages, including Malay, English, and Tamil or a Chinese dialect. I have kept to a Straits Chinese spelling of personal names, such as Ji Lin and Shin, which would be Zhilian and Xin in modern-day pinyin. Traditionally, Chinese family names are given first, as in Chan Yew Cheung and Lee Shin.